Author name: csstaff

Date: Wednesday, December 28, 2016 (05:00-09:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department public cycle servers (soak, wash, rinse, and
spin, aka \”cycles\”) and course lab servers (courselab01 and courselab02,
aka \”courselab\”); all users of the CS Department HPC Cluster
(ionic.cs.princeton.edu).

What is happening:
During this window, OS patches will be applied to update our managed
systems to Springdale 7.3. After patching, all systems will be rebooted.

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

Date: Thursday, November 17, 2016 (07:30-08:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department network

What is happening:
The CS Department uplink to OIT\’s network will be temporarily unavailable.
The actual outage time should be only a few seconds, but we are allocating
a half hour for this task in case of trouble.

Why is it happening:
This work will upgrade the uplink between the CS Department and OIT,
providing more total bandwidth to the rest of campus and onward to the
internet.

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, September 6, 2016 (07:00-09:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department public cycle servers (soak, wash, rinse, and
spin, aka \”cycles\”) and course lab servers (courselab01 and courselab02,
aka \”courselab\”)

What is happening:
During this window, the cycles systems will be replaced with newer
hardware, and the courselab systems will be reinstalled and updated with
the latest distribution version of Springdale Linux 7.2.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are installing fresh OSes, all crontabs on the cycles
and courselab machines 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 normal maintenance of the publicly-accessible systems, and
will bring newer versions of installed tools and software.

Please note that with this upgrade, some older versions of software, or
some packages which are no longer part of the distribution, may no longer
be available. We encourage you to verify your workflows after this upgrade
to ensure you are able to continue your work. CS Staff stands ready to
assist with any unforeseen trouble.

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: Wednesday, July 27, 2016 (09:00-11:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Courselab servers (courselab01 and
courselab02).

What is happening:
During this window, these systems will have their OSes reinstalled and
upgraded to the latest distribution version, Springdale 7.2.

Why is it happening:
This is part of normal maintenance of the publicly-accessible systems, and
will bring newer versions of installed tools and software.

Please note that with this upgrade, some older versions of software, or
some packages which are no longer part of the distribution, may no longer
be available. We encourage you to verify your workflows after this upgrade
to ensure you are able to continue your work. CS Staff stands ready to
assist with any unforeseen trouble.

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: August 1, 2016

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department public login hosts, tux.cs.princeton.edu and
opus.cs.princeton.edu (penguins.cs.princeton.edu).

What is happening:
On August 1, 2016, tux and opus will be turned off and retired. Future
logins should use cycles.cs.princeton.edu (soak, wash, rinse, or spin).

NOTE: As these servers are retiring, all crontabs on tux and opus will be
retired with them. If you need to maintain a crontab currently active on
one of these systems, you will need to relocate it to one of the cycles
machines before August 1.

The DNS names \”tux\”, \”opus\”, and \”penguins\” will all remain for a period of
at least six months, and will become aliases for \”cycles.cs.princeton.edu\”.
We encourage you to use the time to update your scripts, configurations, or
other references to the retiring names.

Why is it happening:
The purpose of tux and opus, for the last several years, has been to
provide a space for lightweight interactive work such as reading email or
organizing files. This was specifically intended to separate these
interactive activities from the more computationally intensive work done on
the cycles servers, so as to reduce the incidence of conflict.

In recent years, advances in kernel technology and our configuration
management systems have enabled us to provide a more stable and fair
environment in the cycles servers such that most users can maintain a
reasonable share of system resources, even while other users are doing
computationally intensive work. For this reason, the separation of the
penguins servers is no longer as useful as it once was, and the costs of
maintaining the distinct system configurations (as well as user confusion
resulting in computationally intensive work running on penguins) has risen
enough to outweigh the benefits.

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

If this system retirement 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.

Date: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 (05:00-08:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS department computing.

What is happening:
We are upgrading our storage operating system, which requires for CS
storage to be rebooted. All services that depend upon access to storage
will be unavailable, including – cycle servers, ionic cluster, web content,
home directories, CIFS, etc.

Why is it happening:
This is necessary in order to fix numerous bugs on our file system.

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
_______________________________________________

Update – 08:05 – An unexpected problem with the wrap-up up this morning\’s maintenance has resulted in a widespread outage of CS Department Services. We are working to restore service ASAP.

Update – 09:02 – We are still working to restore service ASAP.

Update – 09:20 – We are in the process of bringing services back online. We will have another update at 9:45.

Update – 09:48 – Most services are now back online. We should have everything restored by 10:00.

Update – 10:14 – A few services are still coming up. SMTP server is not up yet so sending email is not working. You can use webmail.cs.princeton.edu to send and receive email.

Update – 10:50 – SMTP service is now working.

Date: Thursday, May 5, 2016 (07:30-08:00)

Who is affected:
Users of CS Department Email Services (IMAP, POP, webmail, etc.)

What is happening:
One of the two CS mailbox servers supporting the IMAP, POP, and Webmail
services will be shutdown for replacement of a defective DIMM. As a result,
users whose accounts are hosted by this server will experience
disconnection and an inability to read e-mail for a brief time while the
server is offline.

Why is it happening:
Hardware monitoring has indicated that a DIMM in this system is in a
pre-failure state and likely to fail soon. So as to avoid an unplanned
failure that may threaten the stability of the host, we are scheduling this
outage to replace the failing DIMM preemptively.

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, March 15, 2016 (08:00-14:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department HPC Cluster (ionic.cs.princeton.edu).

What is happening:
On this day, the \”ionic\” cluster will be reinstalled and upgraded to the
latest OS distribution version, Springdale 7.2. This is a complex upgrade,
which is the reason for the unusually long outage window.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are reloading the operating system, any crontabs on the
cluster will be lost. 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 normal maintenance of the publicly-accessible systems, and,
along with the patching of the cycles and penguins machines (announced
separately), will bring our primary public computational systems into
harmony running the same versions of Springdale Linux.

Please note that with this upgrade, some older versions of software, or
some packages which are no longer part of the distribution, may no longer
be available. We encourage you to verify your workflows after this upgrade
to ensure you are able to continue your work. CS Staff stands ready to
assist with any unforeseen trouble.

For most workflows, it should be possible to test your code on the cycles
machines in advance of the upgrade, as they are already running a version
of Springdale Linux that is close to the version to be installed during
this window. Some things will likely still differ after the upgrade, since
the cycles machines will also be updated, but the cycles machines are
receiving only minor updates, so breaking changes should be few or none.

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, March 15, 2016 (08:00-09:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department public login servers (tux and opus, aka
\”penguins\”) and cycle servers (soak, wash, rinse, and spin, aka cycles\”)

What is happening:
During this window, these systems will be patched and updated from their
current Springdale 7.1 OS to the latest version, Springdale 7.2.

This is considered a minor update. Any resulting problems should be small
and relatively easily addressed. Since these machines are being patched
rather than reinstalled, cron jobs will remain intact.

Why is it happening:
This is part of normal maintenance of the publicly-accessible systems, and,
along with the upgrade of our HPC cluster (announced separately), will
bring our primary public computational systems into harmony running the
same versions of Springdale Linux.

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: Thursday, February 18, 2016 (09:00-15:00)

Who is affected:
CS email users who attempt to interact with the Proofpoint spam filtering
system

What is happening:
We will be updating the Proofpoint spam filtering software on our mail
servers.

While no email outage is expected, it is possible that you may receive some
extra spam during the upgrade as the filters go offline for updates. You
may also find that you are unable to interact with the Proofpoint systems
during this time to perform actions such as releasing quarantined messages.
All mail sending, delivery, and reading mechanisms are expected to remain
operational.

Note that the maintenance window does not start until 09:00, so as to
provide some time after the 08:00 digests are sent out during which you may
release messages from the morning digest.

Why is it happening:
This is a necessary part of the regular maintenance of our systems.

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