August 2021

Date: Thursday, August 19, 2021 (07:00-08:00)

Who is affected:
Users of CS Department Network Services, including e-mail, web servers, and
other remotely-accessed services

What is happening:
During this window, the CS Department\’s border router (csgate) uplink to
the OIT network (and to the internet from there) will undergo a
reconfiguration. This reconfiguration will enable BGP for csgate and
disable RIP.

Actual outage time is expected to be less than a minute, but we are
scheduling a longer window to account for the unexpected.

Why is it happening:
As part of OIT\’s Next Generation Network planning and deployment, the
campus network is evolving from RIPv2 routing to use BGP instead. This
switch to BGP for csgate is the first step in a multi-step process that
will end with the department uplink having better redundancy and better
performance. Stay tuned for those updates over the next few months!

We will post updates to the status page: http://www.csstaff.org
as necessary.

If this downtime will cause you undue hardship, please contact
csstaff@cs.princeton.edu immediately, so we can discuss options to reduce
any negative impact. Your patience is appreciated.

Sincerely,
CS Staff
_______________________________________________
downtime mailing list
downtime@lists.cs.princeton.edu
https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/downtime

Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2021 (07:00-12:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Beowulf high performance computing cluster,
known as ionic.

All users of the CS Staff-managed public login systems, including the
cycles, courselab, and armlab systems.

What is happening:
During this window, OS patches will be applied to update our managed ionic
systems from Springdale 7.8 to 7.9. After patching, all systems will be
rebooted. In addition, cluster management and job scheduling system slurm
and its database will be upgraded. No data loss is anticipated.

Cycles and courselab systems will have their OSes reinstalled and upgraded
from Springdale 7.8 to 7.9.

Armlab systems will be rebooted.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are reloading the Linux servers, all crontabs will be
deleted. If you have crontabs that you wish to persist, you will need to
back up your crontabs before the downtime, and restore them after.

Why is it happening:
This is part of regular maintenance to keep systems up-to-date.

We will post updates to the status page: http://www.csstaff.org
as necessary.

If this downtime will cause you undue hardship, please contact
csstaff@cs.princeton.edu immediately, so we can discuss options to reduce
any negative impact. Your patience is appreciated.

Sincerely,
CS Staff
_______________________________________________
downtime mailing list
downtime@lists.cs.princeton.edu
https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/downtime