IRIS News | Instructional & Research Information Systems

EECS Mailing Lists emergency maintenance May 15, 7pm

May 15, 2025 by Rob McNicholas

The EECS Mailing List server lists.eecs.berkeley.edu is experiencing some problems after recent patching. At this time, scheduled tasks such as syncing list membership from external sources, sending reminder emails, or building archives, are not working. This server will be taken down tonight, Thursday May 15, at 7pm in order to try to diagnose the problem or revert back to a pre-patched version. Total downtime should be less than 2 hours. During this time, any mail sent to a list on lists.eecs.berkeley.edu or lists.simons.berkeley.edu will be delayed but no mail should be lost.

Please send any questions to help@eecs.

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May IRIS Server Patching

May 12, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, May 14th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

Linux servers lists.eecs, iris2.eecs (for access to the network and roster databases), and login.eecs/login-mfa.eecs will be patched and rebooted Wednesday night. DNS servers cronus, themis, and rhea may also be briefly unavailable while rebooting at approximately 8:00pm Tuesday.

On Thursday, May 15th, the departmental DHCP server is scheduled for downtime from about 9am to 9:30am (actual downtime is expected to be shorter than scheduled).

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April IRIS Server Patching

April 7, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, April 8th, 2025. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, April 9th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Wednesday, April 9th, the departmental DHCP server is scheduled for downtime from 10pm to 10:30pm (actual downtime is expected to be shorter than scheduled).

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EECS Network Maintenance, Wed. Mar. 26

March 24, 2025 by Derek Calderon

We will be performing various network maintenance activities throughout the day on Wednesday, March 26th during the previously announced Soda Hall 2nd floor power shutdown. We expect that most of our work will not affect wired and wi-fi network service, however there will be some brief outages as described below.

Between 12PM and 1PM on the 26th, the areas listed below will experience at least one interruption to network connectivity. We expect most of these interruptions to be under one minute in length, but some wi-fi service may be unavailable for 5-10 minutes.

BWRC (wired and wi-fi)
BiD in HMMB (EECS wired)
Soda Hall all floors (wi-fi)
Soda Hall 4F north side, 5F-7F (wired and wi-fi)

Update 15:44: This work has been completed and all networks are online. Please contact us at help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you notice any issues.

Soda Hall 2nd Floor Power Outage on March 26, 2025

March 14, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Following up on the work done during the June 13th Soda Hall power outage, we have a similar outage for the second floor of Soda Hall scheduled during Spring Break, to complete (hopefully!) a circuit breaker replacement. As with the last outage, electrical power to the Soda Hall second floor will be down during much of the day on Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Critical systems will be down from about 6am until perhaps 5pm.

Of primary note is that the department NetApp fileservers will be down, so any systems that depend on HOME or PROJECT storage will be shutdown or nonfunctional. Services that will be unavailable during the maintenance period include: department webservice (including people.eecs, www2.eecs and all other IRIS-hosted web sites), IRIS account & network forms, login servers (login.eecs, login-mfa.eecs, winterm.eecs), print server print.eecs, and outgoing SMTP server smtp.eecs.

Any systems that remain powered-on but make use of HOME or PROJECT storage may become unresponsive during this time. Rebooting after maintenance is completed is usually recommended.

Services that will remain online and available include: DHCP, EECS Active Directory, EECS LDAP, wired networking, DNS (cronus.eecs), and maillists (lists.eecs), and the main department website eecs.berkeley.edu.

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March IRIS Server Patching

March 7, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, March 12th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Wednesday, March 12th, the departmental DHCP server is scheduled for downtime from 10pm to 10:30pm (actual downtime is expected to be shorter than scheduled).

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Cory Hall Network Outage, Tues. 2/18

February 18, 2025 by Derek Calderon

Cory Hall networks were unstable today between approx. 9:25AM – 11:00AM due to an apparent misbehaving end-user device on the 4th floor. We have temporarily removed this device from the network and all networks are stable at this time.

Please contact us at help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you notice any issues or have any questions.

gateway.eecs upgrade

February 12, 2025 by Rob McNicholas

The IRIS authenticated SMTP relay gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu was upgraded this morning to a new operating system and mail software. The suggested configuration for the new server is:

name: gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu
port: 587
Encryption: STARTTLS
Authentication method: normal password
Username: your IRIS username (e.g. robm)
Password: your IRIS password

The old server apparently accepted email addresses for the username (e.g. robm@eecs.berkeley.edu) but this does not work on the new servers. If you are having problems authenticating, please check your Username configuration.

February IRIS Server Patching

February 7, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, February 11th, 2025. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, February 12th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Wednesday, February 12th, the departmental DHCP server is scheduled for downtime from 10pm to 10:30pm (actual downtime is expected to be shorter than scheduled).

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Campus Network Instability, Fri. Feb 7

February 7, 2025 by Derek Calderon

We have been experiencing campus-level network instability since sometime around midnight, which is affecting the EECS and BWRC networks. Network team is investigating and working with the vendor to restore full network connectivity.

Update 2/11 6:41AM: The campus network team resolved these issues late Friday evening and our monitoring indicates that the network has been stable since. Please contact help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you notice any ongoing issues.