Lars Rohrbach

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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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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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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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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IT Support During Winter 2024 Energy Curtailment

December 10, 2024 by Lars Rohrbach

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Tuesday, December 24 to Wednesday, January 1, reopening on Thursday, January 2, 2024. Additionally, much of campus is on reduced support for January 2-3.

All departmental computing servers will remain on and should be available during the break, but there will be no staff on site to provide any computing support or handle any requests. Automatic monitoring systems will alert staff to critical infrastructure problems, and any such problems will be dealt with on a best-effort basis. You may wish to turn off any workstations or printers in your office, to help with energy savings.

The IRIS Helpdesk office will be closed Monday, December 23 through Friday, January 3, re-opening on Monday, January 6. If you need assistance between January 2-3, please email help@eecs, and we may be able to schedule an appointment with you. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (510-642-7777) or emailed to help@eecs during the campus closure period, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until at least January 2.

Requests for network support or new IRIS accounts that are received after noon Tuesday, December 17 may not be processed until January 6, 2024.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (for details, see the Instructional website). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs email over the break. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until at least January 2.

Computing support staff will be monitoring their email when possible, so please use standard email addresses to report any urgent problems. As a reminder:

Instructional Computing Environment: inst@eecs

Research / Staff Computing Environment: help@eecs

Information regarding campus IT closures is available here: https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/reduced-it-support-winter-holidays

Happy Holidays!

December IRIS Server Patching

December 6, 2024 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, December 10th, 2024. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, December 11th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Wednesday, December 11th, 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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DNS disruption for eecs.berkeley.edu, Nov 19

November 20, 2024 by Lars Rohrbach

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.

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