June 2013

This is a repost of an OIT message. This downtime is being performed by OIT but affects wireless networking in the CS Building.

Service(s) affected: Wireless networking in all Administrative and Academic Buildings on both Main Campus and Forrestal B Site 6/15/2013 from 06:00 to 10:00.
Date/time of outage: 06/15/2013 6:00 am
Duration of outage: 4 hours 0 minutes

There will be a wireless networking outage in all administrative and academic buldings on both Main Campus and Forrestal B Site on 6/15/2013 from 06:00 to 10:00 AM. This is needed for a system reconfiguration.

Who is affected:

• All users of the CS Department \”cycles\” or \”penguins\” systems (soak, wash, rinse, spin, opus or tux).

What is happening:

• On Tuesday morning, the cycles systems will be replaced with newer, faster hardware with more memory. The existing cycles machines will later be added to the ionic compute cluster. At the same time, opus and tux will have OS updates applied.
• SPECIAL NOTE: As we are replacing the hardware, the operating systems on the cycles systems will also be reinstalled, so all crontabs will be deleted. You will need to back up your crontabs before the downtime, and put them back after.

Why is it happening:

• As part of routine maintenance, and to provide enhanced capabilities, the hardware running our systems is periodically replaced, and OS updates are periodically applied.
• Further, OS updates are urgent at this time for all of our Linux systems as a result of recent kernel vulnerabilities for which we have seen active exploits occurring.