June 2009 Archives

UTS has announced that access to the internet from campus and vice versa will be spotty on Friday, June 26th while Orion does some maintenance.

There was a ten-second power outage this morning. The servers stayed up but all workstations (except the few on battery backup) went down.

Firefox 3.0.11 has been installed on the ms workstations. This fixes a security flaw publicized yesterday.

There will be a ten-minute power outage in BSB and HH at 5:30 am on Tuesday, June 23rd. The servers will stay up but workstations will lose power. I suggest you power off self-administered systems on Monday evening; we will take care of linux and OS X shutdowns for systems we manage.

The server and ms workstations are still sluggish at times as one server is still doing the bulk of the heavy service. This should be rectified by Tuesday.

I will be out of the office from Tuesday June 9th through Tuesday June 16th. Email sent to sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca will be monitored by other RHPCS analysts while I am away.

The ms workstations will freeze up for about one minutes shortly afternoon while I make adjustments on the server. You should not need to reboot.

Email will be unavailable for a few minutes at a stretch several times on Monday because of some email maintenance I'm working on.

We are still running on one server instead of two while the recovery of the large main disk array continues. Workstations will be a bit sluggish at times. We should be back on two servers some time Thursday.

Workstation access is still being restored; most will be ready by 10:00 am.

I have declared the second failed disk in the main data array officially dead after following a few false leads. Any mail received and any file changes between 4:30 am and 10:15 am are irrecoverably lost.

We are now running with the backup of the home folders on the fail-over file server (which is actually mathserv, the mail/web server).

Mail is flowing again as of 5:20 pm. Access to mail clients was opened at 5:30 pm.

Workstation access will be down until Tuesday morning.

Mail, web and workstation may be slow Tuesday while I get the main file server into full service.

Note that all web sites are back up after a brief interruption. Web sites under home directories (e.g. www.math.mcmaster.ca/~moylek) are available read-only from the backup server and so cannot be modified.

It appears fairly certain that the second disk really did fail before the replacement for the first failed disk could be built into the array. The file server, workstations and email will be down all day while I replace the disks and recover from files from backup.

Once recovery is under way, I will make a final attempt to recover data from the old disks which may mean that no data is lost. If that fails, any file changes or mail received between 4am and 10:15 am will be lost.

A second disk failed in the main data array at ca. 10:45 this morning. I am going to be taking the file server down to investigate. Workstation and mail will be down; most web sites will stay up. I will post an update before noon.

A disk failure on Sunday evening has left the main data array running slowly and slowing down workstation access while the array is rebuilt with a spare disk. I may be deactivating imap access to mail periodically to relieve load.