November 2008 Archives

The file server was down Sunday morning from 4:30 am to 10:00 am. Still investigating.

Mathserv was rebooted just after 3pm today (later than announced) but was only down for two minutes. All services are back to normal now.

I will be rebooting mathserv at 2:30 pm today to sort out some lingering problems. Web, email and workstations will be down for about ten minutes.

Please don't reboot your workstations; they will freeze when the server goes down and should return to life when the server comes back up.

Systems were down for half an hour late this morning because of the servers seized up. Everything is back on line as of 11:52 and we are investigating.

The primary server was effectively unresponsive due to a network problem with the file server. The servers and systems are responding normally as of 3:15 pm.

The HH-402 printer is back from the shop and is working just fine. It is now the default printer for the HH-402 workstations again.

A few people have encountered problems with Firefox 3 so I have rolled back to version 2. You can still use version 3 with the command firefox3 (from the command line or from Alt-F2).

One ms-workstation user has complained that firefox 3 seems slower than firefox 2; I am investigating. If you wish to use the previous version, you can run the command firefox2 from the command line or Alt-F2.

I've upgraded Firefox 3 on the ms workstations from 3.0.3 to 3.0.4, so you may see an upgrade notice again and be asked about your default browser choice.

The latest version of Thunderbird has been installed on the ms workstations. You should notice no changes other than Thunderbird prompting you for add-on upgrades.

The latest version of Firefox has been installed on the ms workstations; this version (3.0.3) is now the default. The problems that arose with the late October Hotmail upgrade appear to be resolved with this new version.

The latest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) has also been installed.

Mail was trickling through the incoming queue between noon and 3:45 pm. The jam has been cleared and mail is flowing again. You may see a spike of spam because spam filtering was turned off 30 seconds (during which period hundreds of messages were delivered).

The file server is now fully operational and workstation access has been restored.

The primary file server crashed early Sunday morning. As of noon Sunday, it is running again and the main server is now serving mail, web, etc. Workstation are still down while one of the file systems is rebuilt; full access should return early this afternoon.

Access to home directories via Windows File Sharing (SMB) was not working properly following last week's server changes but is now fixed. But note that users pre-Leopard versions of OS X will need to use mathserv2 instead of mathserv.
See the FAQ for more information.

In addition to the expected network downtime this morning, we had two outages on departmental servers: one of the two file servers crashed early Sunday morning and restarted a little after noon; the web server was down for twenty minutes on Sunday afternoon.