IRIS News | Instructional & Research Information Systems

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.

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 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).

[Read more…]

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.

January IRIS Server Patching

January 10, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, January 14th, 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, January 15th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Wednesday, January 15th, 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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North campus power outage Jan 4, 2025

January 4, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

We have a power outage on part of campus, affecting at least Cory and Soda Halls, starting at just after 8am this morning. All EECS systems and networks may be unavailable until power is restored.

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EECS Mailing Lists Unavailable, Thurs. Dec. 12

December 12, 2024 by Derek Calderon

Since some time last night, our mailing list server lists.eecs has been offline due to an issue with the system. Staff are beginning to investigate and an update will be posted here when available.

While the list server is offline, some emails will be delayed, and any messages sent through an EECS mailing list will not be delivered on time.

Please contact help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you have any questions.

Update: Dec 12, 9am, Rob McNicholas

After installing the most recent patches, this machine would not boot up. We reverted to a previous kernel and the system is now up.