July 2010 Archives

The server which failed is back up as of 8:00 AM today. No files were lost. Queued mail for people with usernames m - z is now flowing, although filtering and delivery of the thousands of queued messages (mostly spam, of course) may take hour or so.

The source problem will not be corrected until after the long weekend and so the server must be considered unstable for the next few days.

The failed file server is back up as of 12:45 am Saturday but it will take several hours for the file systems to recover; I am going to let that process finish and then perform backups before I bring them back on-line.

Web services will continue to work. Mail and login will be available for people with usernames starting with a - l. MS workstations as well as mail/login access for everyone else will be down until some time midmorning on Saturday.

The ultimate source of the problem is still unknown, but is related to power supplies. The file server must be considered unstable for the next few days.

One of our file servers went down Friday evening. I'm not sure when it will be back up but I will have an updated notice up early Saturday morning.

Firefox on the ms workstations was updated on Friday (to ver. 3.6.7) and again today (to ver. 3.6.8); the Adobe Acrobat plugin was also updated. With each update, you will see a "welcome to the new version" message from Firefox and may be asked to select this latest version as your default browser.

The scheduled downtime went as planned and the servers and workstation were back on-line as of 11:05 AM. Thanks for your patience.

The Math & Stats servers will be down from 9 AM - 11 AM on Thursday, July 22nd while we install new equipment in the server room. All of the ms workstations will be down, the computation servers will be turned off, and email will be unavailable (mail sent to our server should simply be delayed). Note that a read-only version of the www.math.mcmaster site will be up on a backup system during the downtime.