Until now it was not possible to print on D-PHYS printers while you're on the road with mobile devices. Since several people expressed their interest in such a possibility, we have created two methods that allow you to do just that: read more.
As there's no common standard for mobile printing, certain restrictions apply. If you find yourself with an email that you think should print but doesn't, please let us know.
Note: this is a purely anecdotal posting about our struggles with some performance bottlenecks in the last few months. If you're not interested in such background information, just skip.
You might have noticed that since about January 2012 using our file and mail servers hasn't been as smooth as usual. This posting will give you some background information concerning the challenges we encountered and why it took so long to fix them. Let's begin with the file server.
Way back in the days (i.e. 5 years ago), when the total file server data volume at D-PHYS was about 10 TB, we used individual file server to store this data. When one server was full, we got a bigger one, copied all the data and life was good for another year or two. Today, the file server data volume (home and group shares) is above 150 TB and growing fast and this strategy doesn't work any longer: individual servers don't scale and copying this amount of data alone takes weeks. That's why in 2009 we started migrating the 'many individual servers' setup to a SAN architecture in which the file servers are just huge hard drives (iSCSI over Infiniband, for the technically inclined) connected to a frontend server that manages space allocation and the file system. The same is true for the backup infrastructure, where the data volume is even bigger.
This new setup had to be developed, tested and put in place as seamlessly and unobtrusively as possible while ensuring data access at all times (apart from single hour-long migrations). The SAN architecture was implemented for Astro in December 2010 and has been running beautifully ever since. In 2011 we laid the groundwork to adopt this system for the rest of D-PHYS's home and group shares and after a long and thorough testing period the rollout happened on January 5, 2012. Unfortunately, that's when things got ugly.
At first, we noticed some exotic file access problems on 32bit workstations. It took us some time to understand that the underlying issue was an incompatibility with the new filesystem using 64-bit addresses for the data blocks. As a consequence we had to replace the filesystem of the home shares. Independently we ran into serious I/O issues with the installed operating system, so we had to upgrade the kernel of the frontend server and move the home directories onto a dedicated server. In parallel, we had to incorporate some huge chunks of group data while always making sure that nightly backups were available. All this necessitated a few more migrations until we finally achieved a stable system on March 28.
The upshot: what we had hoped to be a fast and easy migration turned out to cause a lot of problems and take much longer than anticipated, but now we have a stable and solid setup that will scale up to hundreds or even thousands of TB of data.
See live volume management and usage graphs for our file servers.
As for the mail server, matters are to some extent related and partly just coincidental in time. The IMAP server does need access to the home directories and hence also suffered when their performance was impaired. But even after having solved the file server issues, we still saw single load peaks on the IMAP server that prevented our users from working with their email. Again, we put a lot of time and effort into finding the reason. As of April 13, we're back to good performance and arrive at the following set of conclusions:
Particular issues:
General mail server load:
Bottom line:
We'd like to thank you for your patience during the last 4 months and apologize for any inconvenience you might have had to endure. In all likelihood the systems will be a lot more stable in the future, but of course we're constantly working to ensure the D-PHYS IT infrastructure is able to keep up with the fast growing demand of disk space (the data volume has tripled in the last year alone). We've learned a lot and we'll put it to good use.
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.
Last night a security problem was detected in the SMB server software we use for our group and home shares. In order to protect your data and our systems, we
temporarily restrict access to our group and home shares to the ETHZ IP address range
until security updates are available. If you're outside the ETH network and need to access your data, use VPN. We expect the updates to be released later today or tomorrow and will then go back to world wide access.
In order to restructure the filesystem of the home directories, we schedule a migration on
Wednesday, 28. March 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.
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 19:40 Migration completed. Every test we could think of passed. Please let us know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for your patience.
ID-Kom plans to upgrade the access routers of the HIT building next Friday morning (9th of March) between 6:00 and 7:30am. This causes a network interruption for about 15 minutes during this time in the HIT building.
All D-PHYS Servers located in HIT D 13 are not affected by this interrupt and are reachable from outside the HIT building at any time.
Yesterday's outage could be traced to a flaky voltage controller on one of our RAID adapters. We schedule a short maintenance downtime on
Sunday, Feb 12, around 13:00
in order to replace the faulty controller. Most services will be affected.
Update 14:57 Cleanup took a bit longer than expected, but now all system are back again.
Severe hardware failure on one of our core infrastructure servers. We're working on it.
Update 11:44 The hardware problem could be fixed and all services are recovering now. Sorry for the downtime.
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 solve our recent file server problems, we schedule another migration on
Wednesday, January 25, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.
During this time, you will not have access to your home or group directories, and also email will only work intermittently. Please stop all running jobs and log out prior to the migration.
Update 20:30 Migration completed. Every test we could think of passed. Please let us know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for your patience.
