Author name: scott

It appears that the CS network is not reachable from the outside. We are en route to campus to troubleshoot the problem.

Update (23:05): It seems that the fiber link between the department and the main campus (and onward to the internet) is not working. Technicians are working to sort out the issue ASAP.

Update (01:35 7/13): A damaged fiber has been located and replaced. Network service to the CS Department should now be restored.

Who is affected:
All users of the CS department computing and network infrastructure

What is happening:
We are physically moving our gateway router and core switch between racks within the second floor construction area and transitioning to new fiber uplinks. During this time, both wired and wireless networking will be unavailable in the CS building. All CS-based services will be unavailable including cycle servers, ionic cluster, e-mail, web content, DNS, DHCP, CIFS, etc. CS portions of the wired network will be unavailable in Sherrerd Hall (CITP), 221 Nassau (PlanetLab), and the Friend Center (010 Suite).

Why is it happening:
This is part of the renovation work.

Who is affected:
Most users in the CS Building

What is happening:
We will be temporarily disconnecting and then reconnecting many wired network ports over a wide swath of the CS Building. This specifically includes offices that have had their connections recently moved from one box to another. It also includes the uplink to room 002.

Why is it happening:
This is part of the network relocation that is part of the ongoing CS Building renovations.

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department or campus network or computing infrastructure, including, but not limited to, e-mail, web service, and public login hosts.

What is happening:
During this window, OIT will be performing maintenance on the campus network, resulting in no network service outside the CS network. This outage will include internet service and wireless service all over campus.

Also during this time, the CS linux servers will be patched and rebooted. The penguins (tux, opus) and cycles (soak, wash, rinse, and spin) hosts will be reinstalled.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are reinstalling the penguins and cycles login servers, 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:
This is part of regular maintenance to keep systems up-to-date.

This is a reschedule of the secondary tasks of an outage originally scheduled for November 27, 2013, and cancelled due to unscheduled and unrelated problems.

Who is affected:
All users of CS Department wired networks, including network users in the CS Building, 221 Nassau St., Sherrerd Hall, Friend Center, and 151 Forrestal Road (the HPCRC).

This outage will also affect the OIT wireless network ONLY in the CS Building.

Actual outages are expected to be much shorter than the full window, but outages local to any particular location will occur at various times throughout the window for 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

What is happening:
During this time, several network switches will be updated to newer versions of their operating systems.

Why is it happening:
The switch software updates will address a few minor bugs which have come up lately, including performance-limiting bugs.

This is a reschedule of an outage originally scheduled for November 27, 2013, and cancelled due to unscheduled and unrelated problems.

Who is affected:
All users of CS Department wired networks, including network users in the CS Building, 221 Nassau St, Sherrerd Hall, Friend Center, and 151 Forrestal Road (the HPCRC).

This outage will also affect the OIT wireless network ONLY in the CS Building.

What is happening:
During this time, the Department\’s network uplink (to the main campus, and onward to the greater Internet) will be upgraded from its current 1Gbps link to a 10Gbps link.

Why is it happening:
The campus uplink upgrade will enable greater opportunities for collaboration by increasing the rate at which data can be moved across the network. This will enable high-speed data transfer between CS Department systems and systems in other departments on campus and, in some circumstances, other remote locations.

4:00pm : We are experiencing a problem with our infrastructure. E-mail, websites, cycle servers, and file systems are impacted. We are investigating.

4:25pm: The CS LDAP servers are currently having some issues, which are causing problems with email and the file system. We are working to address the problem and should have an update soon.

4:40pm: The LDAP Servers have been fixed. The file system and email should start working again in the next 15 minutes.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. These hosts will receive a critical security update and be rebooted.
2. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

On Saturday, March 16, 2013, we will have a scheduled downtime from 6:00am to 8:00am EDT.

Who is affected:

• All users of the CS wired network (including PlanetLab at 221 Nassau, CS hosts in CITP in Sherrerd, and the CS section of the data center at 151 Forrestal) as well as users of the OIT wireless network in the CS Building.

What is happening:

• We will be updating the firmware on the department\’s gateway router and firewall service module. During this time, there will be no OIT wireless connectivity in the CS Building (as the OIT access points use the CS wired infrastructure) and there will be no Internet connectivity between the CS network and the outside world.

Why is it happening:

• This update will address some ongoing network issues affecting a limited number of services.

OIT is reporting that the puwireless is not available to some users. For more details, see their outage message.