All

Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2021 (05:00-06:00)

Who is affected:
Users of CS Department Email Services

What is happening:
CS Department email services will be momentarily unavailable while critical
updates take place.

Why is it happening:
On September 30, 2021, an important TLS Root CA Certificate (\”DST Root X3\”)
will expire. This expiration may cause communication disruption for some
older servers, including one server in our email infrastructure. This brief
outage will allow us to update the system to avoid unplanned disruption
after the certificate expiration.

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

If this work 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, August 19, 2021 (07:00-08:00)

Who is affected:
Users of CS Department Network Services, including e-mail, web servers, and
other remotely-accessed services

What is happening:
During this window, the CS Department\’s border router (csgate) uplink to
the OIT network (and to the internet from there) will undergo a
reconfiguration. This reconfiguration will enable BGP for csgate and
disable RIP.

Actual outage time is expected to be less than a minute, but we are
scheduling a longer window to account for the unexpected.

Why is it happening:
As part of OIT\’s Next Generation Network planning and deployment, the
campus network is evolving from RIPv2 routing to use BGP instead. This
switch to BGP for csgate is the first step in a multi-step process that
will end with the department uplink having better redundancy and better
performance. Stay tuned for those updates over the next few months!

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, August 17, 2021 (07:00-12:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Beowulf high performance computing cluster,
known as ionic.

All users of the CS Staff-managed public login systems, including the
cycles, courselab, and armlab systems.

What is happening:
During this window, OS patches will be applied to update our managed ionic
systems from Springdale 7.8 to 7.9. After patching, all systems will be
rebooted. In addition, cluster management and job scheduling system slurm
and its database will be upgraded. No data loss is anticipated.

Cycles and courselab systems will have their OSes reinstalled and upgraded
from Springdale 7.8 to 7.9.

Armlab systems will be rebooted.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are reloading the Linux servers, all crontabs 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 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: Wednesday, July 28, 2021 (09:30-11:30)

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

What is happening:
A single node of our file server cluster will be shutdown for the
replacement of a defective DIMM.

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

We do not anticipate any outages, but you may find that some connections
(especially CIFS/SMB) may need to be reestablished.

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

UPDATE: 10:30 AM – The upgrade is progressing as expected, but some minor issues have arisen. At this time, SMB/CIFS connections to the cluster are not functioning. We are working to correct the issue and will update this post when it is done.

UPDATE: 11:45 AM – We have found a workaround for the SMB/CIFS connection issue. SMB/CIFS connections should be working normally again and we will continue troubleshooting the backend issue later this week. At this time, the planned upgrade is complete.

Date: Monday, August 9, 2021 (05:00-12:00)

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
might be unavailable for some periods during this window, including –
cycle servers, ionic cluster, web content, home directories, CIFS, etc.

Why is it happening:
Our current operating system has reached end-of-life status and needs an
upgrade.

Bear in mind that, while we do not anticipate any extended service outages,
you may find that there are momentary interruptions and some connections
(especially CIFS/SMB connections) may need to be reestablished.

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

Date: Wednesday, June 23, 2021 (08:00-08:15)

Who is affected:
Users of CS Department Email Services

What is happening:
One of the two Zimbra mailbox servers will be rebooted. This will cause a
brief email outage for about half of CS Department email users. After the
reboot, some folks may need to re-authenticate to the email server. There
should be no loss of email; any incoming messages during the outage will
simply be queued for delivery once the server is up.

Why is it happening:
The out-of-band management device for this server has hit a fault and
become unavailable. As a result, our ability to troubleshoot the machine in
an emergency is presently restricted. This device also provides
environmental monitoring to the OS level (including temperature and power
supply status), so those functions are also not presently working. The
reboot will include a power cycle intended to restore the full function of
the hardware.

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

UPDATE: As of 11:55 AM Zimbra is back up and running.

We are currently experiencing issues with Zimbra Webmail. Zimbra is reporting a network error when accessing Webmail. We are working to address the issue and will post updates here.