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.

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.

Today at 09:50 a crucial server died in our HIT server room. It took us about 20 min to move the affected services to other machines, during which time most of our machines weren't usable. We're sorry for the inconvenience. We're working hard to get rid of this fault-prone hardware.

On Wed Sep 23 around 01:00 a major power outage hit Höngg and Affoltern. Our servers on the Hönggerberg campus switched to battery power, but since power was gone for more than 3 h, the batteries eventually drained and all servers switched off. Around 07:15 we began rebooting our infrastructure servers, but it wasn't until noon that the most important services (home, web, mail) were back up. Please bear with us while we still iron out the last remaining issues.

Tomorrow Tue September 8, starting from 0730, we will upgrade our Roundcube installation. Expected downtime: about 15 min.

Update Tue 0734: upgrade done.

On Thursday, the 27th of August 2009 around 16:00 we will start upgrading the operating system and the webserver software of our main webserver zwoelfi. This may lead to a downtime of many websites at D-PHYS including www.phys.ethz.ch and isg.phys.ethz.ch. Update 21:20: All services should be back to normal again.
(more…)

Today at 07:04 a software upgrade of a core router performed by Informatikdienste caused an avalanche of errors in our server cluster, leading to an outage of printing and some other non-critical services. It took us till around 08:00 to get the systems back to normal. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Today around 0715 we experienced a series of power outages in our water-cooled racks in HIT, leading to a shutdown of our most crucial servers. It took us almost two hours to get the systems up and running again, during which time most of our services were not available.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

There will be a short maintenance downtime of our authentication server this evening at 7pm. This means that you won't be able to log in to any managed D-PHYS workstation or D-PHYS service for about 5 minutes. Update 19:01: Maintenance successfully over.
(more…)

Tomorrow Tue March 17, starting from 0730, we will upgrade our Roundcube installation. Expected downtime: about 15 min.

Update Tue 0745: upgrade completed. Have fun.