Today, the 7th of December 2011, around 7pm, there will be a complete network interruption in the whole Department of Physics for about one hour. The central ETH IT Services (“Informatikdienste”) will replace the hardware of the core router to the HPx network zone (includes the HIT building).

Wireless LAN should not be affected, but as the servers will be offline, too, you won't have access to files or mails on the servers, i.e. don't expect to be able to work during the network downtime. The technicians will reconnect the servers first, so access to the servers from the outside of the Department or via WLAN will be restored earlier than 8pm. Workstations and printers will get network access back afterwards.

On Wednesday, 5th of October 2011, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on several 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.

Update, 21:55: Upgrade of the incoming and IMAP/webmail/mailing list servers were successful. Everything is back to normal.

This Thursday, the 7th of July 2011, around 7am, there will be a short network interruption in the whole Department of Physics. The central ETH IT Services ("Informatikdienste") will move our network zone to new hardware, necessary for some future services.

Additionally, the WLAN Landing Page of the "public" network will have a maintenance downtime from 7am to 8am.

On Wednesday, 15th of June 2011, starting at 3pm, we will upgrade the operating system of our webserver zwoelfi.ethz.ch. This implies a downtime of all websites and web-related services (including www.phys.ethz.ch, isg.phys.ethz.ch, lager.phys.ethz.ch, events.phys.ethz.ch, FIRST booking, all wikis and the groupware service) and most MySQL databases for several hours. As many of those websites have to be upgraded as well, they will successively come back online as we patch them up. We'll keep you posted as we proceed.

Update, 21:00: Basic web services are running again, some PHP based sites may still have smaller issues, Zope based sites may still have performance issues, too.

On Wednesday, the 6th of April 2011, starting around 5pm we will upgrade the operating system on the two D-PHYS DHCP servers. This should not cause any interruptions for computers which are already online, but computers which connect to our network between 5pm and 6pm may not get an IP address assigned immediately. As these computers mostly will be mobile devices, we suggest to switch to the wireless network instead for that evening.

On Wednesday, 7th of April 2010, starting at 6pm and lasting until approximately 9pm, there will be several maintenance downtimes for nearly all of our services due to several software upgrades and relocation of servers.

So if you're using one of our managed workstations or thin clients, or use data residing on group drives, please save all your work and preferably log out/disconnect before Wednesday, 6pm. And even if the services seem back after the first short downtime, don't expect to be able to work again from that point on since we will have several short but also some not so short service downtimes in a row.

Update, 20:30h: Most servers and workstations are back online. Not yet ready for usage are: fatboy, the IDL license server and the Condor master server. They will be back later tonight.

Update, 22:45h: fatboy is back online again. But two infrastructure servers (which haven't been touched by today's maintenance) seem to have hardware issues. Because of that the maintenance of the IDL license server and the Condor master server have been postponed until further notice.

On Thursday, 4th of May 2010, starting at 5pm we will migrate our webmail service to the new mail server. Since there are no version upgrades of the webmail applications Roundcube and Twig, it will be a smooth transition and you shouldn't even notice the migration. The only thing which can happen is that you get logged out of webmail if you use webmail while the DNS entry changes to the new server address.

Update, Thursday morning: As yesterday morning's unexpected outage of the old mail server showed further hardware problems, we rescheduled moving the incoming (SMTP) mail server functionality to the new mail server to fit into today's maintenance window, too.

This will also be done by switching DNS entries, so you should not experience any interruption nor do you need to change any configuration. However this may cause some temporary issues (e.g. delays) since it does involve new software versions as well as new authentication backends.

Update, 22:45: New webmail and incoming mail server seem to work fine, nearly all users already use the new service installation.

On Thursday, 18th of February 2010, starting at 5pm there will be a mail service downtime for migrating the D-PHYS and FIRST mailing lists to the new mail server. During the downtime, no new mail can be sent or received and neither access to the mailing lists' web interface nor to the archive will be possible. E-mails sent to D-PHYS during the migration will be held back on the sender’s e-mail servers. Already received mail will be still accessible via IMAP or POP3. Update 9pm: Mailing lists moved to lists.phys.ethz.ch, everything should work fine again.

Together with the mailing list migration, there will come a policy change with regards to mailing lists:

All future mailing lists will be only "@lists.phys.ethz.ch" instead of "@phys.ethz.ch" as before.

Already existing mailing lists will be reachable under both, old "@phys.ethz.ch" or "@first.ethz.ch" as well as new "@lists.phys.ethz.ch" addresses.
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To prepare the next big step in our migration to the new mail server we will have a minor maintenance downtime of our SMTP server on Monday, the 1st of February 2010, starting on 5pm. During the downtime it won't be possible to send or receive new mails via SMTP nor will it be possible to use the mailing lists administrative interface. Mails sent to the Department of Physics during the downtime will be held back on the sending side and will be received afterwards. Mails already stored on our IMAP or POP3 server are accessible during the downtime though. Update, 17:25: Everything back to normal again.

On Monday, November 16th, starting at 6pm we will migrate the D-PHYS IMAP and POP3 server to new hardware. Since this also includes converting all 450 GB of mailboxes on that server, the migration will take several hours. Update Tuesday, 2:50pm: Everything works again. The migration took about twice of the expected time due to some complications.

During the migration it will not be possible to access any of the D-PHYS e-mail services (receiving, sending or accessing your mails, webmail). E-mails sent to D-PHYS during the migration will be held back on the sender's e-mail servers.

After the migration you may need to resynchronise your e-mail client (e.g. Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird) with the new IMAP server. Please read our mail server migration wiki page in case you use one of the e-mail clients mentioned above, use your own procmail filter rules or experience other problems after the migration.
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