On Tuesday, March 19, 2013, we will have a scheduled downtime from 6:00am to 8:00am EDT.
Some of this work (bullets \”1\” below) was originally scheduled for March 5, 2013.
Who is affected:
- Users of the public login machines (soak, wash, rinse, spin, tux, opus), certain CS websites (jobs, kiosk, msdnaa, search, wiki), database servers, runscript, CAS, lpdrelay (printing), labpc machines (Friend Center fishbowl lab) and the ionic cluster.
- Dynamic websites for projects or groups with hostnames of the form project-or-group-name.cs.princeton.edu that are accessing executables (e.g., python, perl, java) on the shared /usr/local filesystem.
What is happening:
- These hosts will receive a critical security update and be rebooted.
- Websites of the form project-or-group-name.cs.princeton.edu are moving to a new server that no longer mounts the shared /usr/local filesystem.
Why is it happening:
- There is a critical kernel security patch available for our Springdale hosts. It addresses a specific security vulnerability. As this is a kernel update, all machines must be rebooted. Actual expected downtime should only be a minute or two for each host to reboot.
- The website migration is the next step to decommission the shared /usr/local filesystem. This work has already been done for the cycles and penguin machines and will result in decreased load on our central file server and simplified management of our web server infrastructure. Additional notes about the website migration:
- In the week leading up to the downtime, we will reach out to the owners of as many affected websites as we can identify with instructions on what they need to do for the migration. We anticipate that very few sites will need modification and that those modifications will be minor.
- After the downtime, all projects and groups should double check that their sites are operating as expected. If not, please notify CS Staff immediately and we can assist and/or temporarily move the site back to the old server.