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Instructional & Research Information Systems

DNS disruption for eecs.berkeley.edu, Nov 19

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Tuesday afternoon and evening, November 19, we had a disruption of DNS resolution for the eecs.berkeley.edu domain on the campus nameservers. This meant that many systems outside of the EECS network were temporarily unable to resolve *.eecs.berkeley.edu hostnames — so people may have been temporarily unable to reach EECS websites or deliver email to some @eecs.berkeley.edu addresses.

The problem started at approximately 3:15pm, and was ultimately fixed at 10:30pm, with the help of campus DNS staff and technicians from InfoBlox, the campus DNS vendor. It appears that a change to our eecs.berkeley.edu zone file was not tolerated well by campus InfoBlox servers, and the zone transfers had been silently failing; cached records began timing out in the afternoon, so DNS queries from outside of EECS then began to fail. Fortunately, we had already begun working with campus DNS staff, to investigate why certain new zone updates weren’t propagating to campus servers.

Machines using EECS nameservers, like most that are on EECS networks, should have been fine during this time.

We are currently working to re-do some of our most recent DNS updates, and they should be in place by Wednesday morning, Nov 20. We are also looking into tuning our system monitoring to alert on potential zone transfer issues, while we work with campus to help monitor from their side.

Resolved as of 2024-11-19 10:30pm

Cory 3F Network Offline, Thursday 11/14 early AM

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On Thursday, November 14th, between 6:30 and 9:45 AM, Cory Hall third floor wired and wireless networks will be offline due to electrical work being performed at the main service panel. Facilities is performing this work in order to restore electrical power to the Cory Hall Helpdesk.

Facilities is reporting that the west side of the third floor (which includes the network closet) will be without power from 6:30 – 9:30 AM. The network devices, particularly the wi-fi APs, will need some time to boot up after power is restored. We typically expect network connectivity to be restored within 10-20 minutes after power returns to the network closet.

Update 11/14 9:36AM: This work was apparently completed without any interruption to the network. Please contact help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you have any questions.

EECS Network Maintenance, 10/31 1-5PM

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On Thursday, October 31 between 1 and 5PM, we will be performing network link migrations in preparation for retiring an old router. This maintenance will affect one of the EECS network’s paths to Campus and the Internet, however we expect no interruption as we have another redundant path which is able to handle our full traffic volume.

Update 10/31 16:22: This work has been completed without any significant interruption to network traffic. Please contact us at help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you notice any issues.

New DNS Nameserver: themis.eecs

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System administrators in EECS may be familiar with our DNS nameservers cronus and rhea. We now have a new nameserver, physically located in Cory Hall, named themis. If your systems are typical DHCP clients, or you don’t use the EECS wired network, then you should have nothing to change.

We are planning to replace and retire rhea according to the following schedule:

  • Thu Oct 15 — We will update our DHCP configuration, telling Cory Hall DHCP clients to use themis and cronus, and telling other DHCP clients to use cronus and themis.
  • November/December — We will monitor any continued usage of rhea for DNS, and periodically alert system administrators so they can update their systems to use themis instead.
  • early January — We will retire rhea, but will point its name and IP address at cronus.