July 2013

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Network

What is happening:
The Department\’s primary border firewall will be replaced with a new firewall device. During the replacement, connections from the CS Department to the main campus, the internet, or to portions of the CS Department network which are outside our firewall, will be interrupted. However, as OIT will also be performing router maintenance between 05:00 and 07:00 (see earlier announcement), we don\’t anticipate this work causing much additional impact.

Why is it happening:
This is the second step of our three-step process to provide 10Gbps networking from our network core out to the main campus, and, by extension, the internet. This upgrade will give our firewall the internal capacity to support 10Gbps connections.

Due to technical complications, the decision was made to postpone the work in order to minimize the risk of problems. Those issues having been worked out, we have rescheduled this maintenance for Monday, August 12, 2013.

Who is affected:
Potentially, all users of CS Department computing and storage infrastructure.

What is happening:
On Thursday, the storage cluster that provides file service for all CS Department public services will undergo upgrades to its network interfaces.

During this maintenance, connections to Samba/CIFS file shares will experience occasional, temporary interruptions. Users may need to re-establish connections to the file share in some cases.

We DO NOT anticipate actual downtime for other services, but since all maintenance involves the risk of broader problems, this announcement serves as a heads-up. In the event of problems with this maintenance, impacts could range up to outages of ALL CS Department public services that rely on the storage cluster (file service, public login hosts, e-mail, web service, etc). Note that wired and wireless networking connectivity will not be affected.

Why is it happening:
This upgrade will provide 10Gbit network connectivity to our storage cluster, getting us one step closer to end-to-end 10Gbit capability for our services.