January 2011

As of 11:30 PM on Thursday, January 20, the virtual web server, virtweb, is unavailable due to memory problems. This issue impacts all project-related web sites within the CS Department. Correcting the problem requires on-site access to the host and will be addressed on Friday morning.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.

UPDATE: 1/21/2011 – One or more processes on the virtweb server had a problem with run-away memory allocation requests. The server was rebooted this morning and all of the web sites hosted on it are now available.

On Saturday, January 22, 2011, from 6:00am to 9:00am EST, there will be a power shutdown in the CS Building. The shutdown will include the electrical panels that supply most of the power to the building including lighting and power to all the offices, hallways, and lab spaces, as well as the elevator.

Please note that this means that all office and lab computers need to be cleanly shutdown before the start of work early Saturday morning. For most users, we expect that you will shutdown your machine(s) when you leave Friday afternoon/evening.

Also note that the power to the main machine room (room 218) is on a separate electrical feed and will remain operational. Therefore, services such as e-mail, web sites, cycle servers (including the c2 cluster), and remote access will not be interrupted.

This work is part of an ongoing project to increase the power and cooling capacity of our basement machine room (room 002).

On Thursday, January 20, 2011, we will have a scheduled downtime from 4:00am to 8:00am EST.

This downtime affects all users of the department\’s computing and networking infrastructure.

Scheduled work includes:

• Upgrade of penguins, cycles, and other systems to CentOS 5.5
• Updates to Zimbra
• Upgrade the print server
• Maintenance/re-configuration of some of our networking infrastructure

During some of the 4am-8am window, most of the services (e.g., E-mail, web, cycle servers) will be unavailable. E-mail destined to the department will be queued and then delivered at the end of the maintenance window.

The other work is part of the normal maintenance of the department infrastructure.