This Thursday 2022-02-10 starting at 07:00 we will upgrade the server hosting most of our websites.

Affected websites

The following websites are unavailable during the downtime:

• Most ISG websites (news, readme, wiki)
• All customer webshares (dedicated websites and webapps)
• D-PHYS shop and Experimente

Important changes for website owners

All website owners: If you are a website owner/admin, please join our new Matrix room #web:phys.ethz.ch, to get support and news. After the upgrade, please check your websites for problems.

Python WSGI app owners: All WSGI apps have been switched to use a virtual environment to pin the currently used Python package versions. We encourage you to review and upgrade your dependency versions (via requirements.txt) after the server upgrade. Please read our new WSGI documentation for details.

Versions

• OS: Debian 10 -> 11
• Python: 3.7 -> 3.9
• PHP: 7.3 -> 7.4

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 Monday morning we found out that large incoming mails (1 MBytes or larger) were dropped without leaving any error messages in our log files. These mails were lost between Thursday (Jan 9) evening 18:27 and Monday (Jan 13) morning 11:06. Some indicators (i.e. spam filter rules for this case) lead us to estimate the number of about 560 broken local deliveries to about 300 unique recipients.

If you expected e-mails with attachments close to 1 MB or larger within this time frame there is a high likelihood that they got lost. The only information we still have about these mails are sender, recipient and arrival date and time. If you were one of these recipients, please contact the sender to send it again.

You can check on this web page if mails you should have received were lost. You'll have to log in with your D-PHYS account and will see sender (or mailing list) of and time when the lost mail arrived. Additionally we'll inform all affected recipients individually, too.

The problem occured after one of the software updates on Thursday which brought stricter code checking, and is solved since Monday morning 11:06.

The issue was caused by a long standing and subtle programming error in the check which prevents bigger mails from being inspected closely by the main spam filter for performance reasons. It was only triggered upon local mail delivery, so mails sent from D-PHYS to outside D-PHYS were not affected. E-mails to D-PHYS mailing lists (or other mailing lists) with archive should be available in the according mailing list archives.

We're truly sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have already taken measures so that similar issues won't result in mail loss from now on.

Update: it happens to the best of us: Gmail for iOS bug might cause data loss

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.

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.

Because of hardware problems with one of our infrastructure servers we couldn't perform the planned software upgrade on the IDL license server and Condor master server during the big maintenance downtime last week.

Those hardware problems are fixed now and so we will install the software upgrade on the IDL license and Condor master server tomorrow, Wednesday, 14th of April 2010, starting at 5 pm. Duration of the maintenance downtime will be approximately two hours.

Update, 20:20h: IDL License and Condor server are both back online.

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.