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.