October 2008 Archives

The power outage scheduled for Friday evening will now take place between 3 pm and 5 pm on Saturday afternoon. Mail and web services will be accessible from off campus during the outage. Compute servers and workstations will be shut down at 2:30 pm.

Workstations should restart automatically.

I'm told that we will lose power in Hamilton Hall and BSB on Friday evening between 8 pm and 10 pm, with a chance that the outage will last until some time on Saturday.

I will be shutting off the compute servers and workstations this evening at 7:45 pm. If the outage extends to Saturday, I will have to shut off the web/email/file servers as well. Full service may not resume before Monday morning in that case.

Most of the linux workstations came up fine on their own after the power outage. The main servers and internet connections stayed up on backup power, so there was no disruption to email or web services.

The internet connection between McMaster and the rest of the world will be down from 7 am to 9 am this Sunday morning. In-bound mail will be queued for delivery once the connection is resumed.

The power in Hamilton Hall and BSB will be out for about two hours starting at 11 pm tonight. I will be shutting down the compute servers and linux workstations at 10 pm. The workstations should boot up on their own when the power comes back on.

About half of the linux workstations were unable to boot today due to errors on the hard drives resulting from the power failure yesterday. I implemented a workaround and all systems were booting by noon today. We are looking into a cleaner solution.

UTS technicians took the HH-402 (PhiMac) printer away for repairs on Tuesday. It should be back next week after replacement rollers are installed.

We took advantage of the power outage to do some extensive server maintenance, much of which would be difficult to do when the systems are live. Workstation access was available this evening at ca. 6 pm and email and other systems at about 8:30 pm. Workstation, web and even email users should all see significant improvements in response times.

The power is back on in Hamilton Hall but the server and systems are still off-line while I complete some opportunistic maintenance and upgrade work.

The power will be out in Hamilton Hall until 5 pm today. I am going to be taking everything but the web server off line shortly.

The power outage persists in Hamilton Hall and BSB and is likely to do so until 12:30 or 1:00 pm. I will leave mathserv running on battery backup as long as possible, but I may have to shut it down before the power returns.

There was a brief, unscheduled power interruption at ca. 8:20 this morning. Mathserv and other servers on UPS weren't effected, but most workstations and some other servers went down and will need to be restarted.

The PhiMac lab printer in HH-402 is down and awaiting a visit from a technician. A service call was placed Thursday afternoon.

Network traffic was interrupted for a few minutes just after 4 pm today due to the crash of a central campus network switch. The most obvious effect was that the linux workstations seized up and traffic in general (email, web, ssh) went sluggish.