Due to required changes to our network infrastructure and some hardware maintenance, we're scheduling a maintenance downtime for most D-PHYS servers starting on Thursday, 14th of April 2016, at 5pm. The downtime will last several hours and single services may be down for longer than others or will be down multiple times in a row.

We'll update this posting as soon as things are back to normal.

Most D-PHYS services will be affected by that downtime, especially file servers and e-mail services, but also some virtual machines and most websites hosted by ISG D-PHYS are affected. (http://www.phys.ethz.ch/ and other AEM-hosted websites are not affected.)

E-mails coming in during the downtime will be held on the sender's side and will arrive at D-PHYS with a delay. Sending e-mails won't be possible during the downtime either.

After the migration we will benefit from a faster and more reliable network connection to our servers.

Update at 19:30: Most services are back to normal. Expect further downtimes for home directories and mail later this evening.

Update at 23:00: All services are available again.

Update Fri 09:00: After Thursday's network migration a defective patch cable caused network problems on Friday morning.

UPDATE 13:30 - Groupdata is back online
UPDATE 02:25 - Astrogate and Windata are back online, except groupdata
UPDATE 22:20 - Home server is back online and email working again

In order to upgrade the operating system on serveral servers, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Sunday, 4th January 2015, starting at 22:00.

Schedule:

During the downtime you can access readonly backups of your data of the night before, take a look at our readme.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

We have scheduled a software maintenance of the D-PHYS mail server for tomorrow, Wednesday, the 18th of June 2014, starting in the late afternoon around 5pm. A downtime of all D-PHYS mail services during the evening will be part of the maintenance. The downtime is expected to take approximately 15 to 30 minutes.

During the downtime sending and receiving e-mails will not be possible and the web mail service will be not available. Incoming mails during the downtime will be delayed.

Additionally there will be a downtime of our "BackupPC" backup service for laptops and lab PCs due to server relocation on Thursday (19th of June 2014) starting around 9am.

On Thursday, the 9th of January 2014, starting in the late afternoon, we will run multiple software updates on the D-PHYS mail server. We do expect multiple downtimes throughout the evening, partially of single mail services, partially of the whole mail server.

This will likely also delay the delivery of incoming mails up to several hours.

Update, 22:30: Everything back to normal.

Starting on Wednesday, the 18th of December 2013 in the late afternoon, we will start upgrading the operating system as well as many web applications on the primary D-PHYS webserver. While we'll try to keep the downtimes as short as possible, some temporary service interruptions can't be avoided and are hence expected.

Potential issues with specific websites hosted on the D-PHYS webserver will be tackled in the days after the upgrade.

In order to upgrade the operating system and the server hardware, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Wednesday, 12. September 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

During this time, you will not have access to the group directories.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

We just replaced our ailing backup server for laptops and lab PCs inplace with new, more performant hardware using the same proven BackupPC software, just a newer version. Its web-interface is available under the same URL.

The new server will start making backups from scratch for every host. Backups on the old server will still be available for a while at the address https://backuppc-old.phys.ethz.ch/.

Our old backup server became a victim of its own success. In the end it handled backups for over 100 hosts every day (over 160 during its whole life-time) and stored about 10 Terabytes of backups.

The BackupPC server of the Institute for Astronomy is not affected.

For some hardware and other maintenance we schedule a downtime of our mail server today (Fri, 13th of April 2012) evening after 6pm.

The downtime will likely take less than one hour. During the downtime you will neither be able to access your mails on the server nor to send mails via our server. Mails which are sent to the Dept. of Physics won't get lost, but will have some lag.

On Thursday, 9th of Februar 2012, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on the remaining servers of our mail server cluster. This will result in temporary unavailability of most e-mail related services we provide: sending and receiving e-mails, mailing lists and webmail access.

Due to the maintenance e-mails may have some lag and arrive a few hours later than usual.

In order to gain more flexibility and performance, the home directories will move to our new SAN setup.

This will be done on Thursday, 5. January 2012, between 18:00 and 22:00.

During this time the home directories (winhome, machome, unixhome), the mail services and some websites will not be available.

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the home directories before the migration.

Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the home directories will still be accessible the same way as before after the migration is over, so you don't have to change anything.

Update, Jan 10: We experience some unexpected and dubious problems with 32bit binaries (and therefore, 32bit machines). The symptoms range from not being able to log in (GNOME and KDE) to acroread and mathematica not starting. Workarounds while we're working on a solution: for failing logins, please call us. For acroread, use evince instead. For mathematica, log in to a 64bit machine, eg. login.phys, and start it remotely.

Update, 21:25: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)