On Friday, September 17, at 22:00,  we will have to extraordinarily reboot our 64-bit Ubuntu workstations in order to deal with a nasty security issue. We're sorry for the short notice but we've been unpleasantly surprised by this just as much as you have. If you're reading this in time, please save all your data and log out if you can. Please note that also the terminal servers plimpy, plompy, plempy and plumpy (yes I know..) are affected. Thank you.

A firmware update on the RAID controller of our file server requires a reboot of this server. We schedule the reboot on Wednesday August 4, at 22:00. The downtime should take no more than 30 min. Please make sure all your data has been saved at that point.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update, 22:20: The server has rebooted and everything should work again.

On Monday, August 2nd, starting at 18:00, we need to modify our LDAP user database to incorporate structural changes needed for a new service we're currently setting up. This will cause a downtime of about 1 h, probably even shorter, that will affect user logins, email and file server access. We will post an update when things are back to normal. Update, 18:30: Things are now back to normal. 🙂

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

Our terminal server plimpy (uptime: 47 days) is slowly clogging up with runaway processes, eating up memory and CPU. Since we cannot tell apart good processes from bad ones, we schedule a maintenance reboot for the Weekend, Saturday night June 19th in order to give the system a fresh start. We ask all users to save their data and log out of their thin clients.

BTW: Users of second generation thin clients (named tc00xx) are kindly invited to test our new ubuntu based terminal server plompy. If you're interested to give it a try, please let us know and we will configure your client.

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.

Our terminal server plimpy (uptime: 80 days) is slowly clogging up with runaway processes, eating up memory and CPU. Since we cannot tell apart good processes from bad ones, we schedule a maintenance reboot for tomorrow, Wednesday February 24 at 18:00 in order to give the system a fresh start. We ask all users to save their data and log out of their thin clients. Update, 18:45: Plimpy is up and running again.

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.

Tomorrow morning, 28th January 2009, we have to replace a broken system harddisk on one of the group fileservers. This will cause a downtime between 07:00 and approximately 07:30.

This will result in a short service interruption for the following groupdrives:

• astro1, hhs, isg, iya, qo, qoarchiv, qpdata, rag, ragmast, ulp-stud, zimpol2, zimpol3

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, it is best to close all open files on the group directories.