Lars Rohrbach

Soda Hall Power Outage on January 4, 2024

November 16, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

To accommodate the installation of new circuit breakers and PDU (Power Distribution Unit) connections, all electrical power to the 2nd and 4th floors of Soda Hall will be shutdown during the day of Thursday, January 4, 2024. Critical systems will be down from 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 gateway.eecs.

Building access should still be allowed, but we recommend avoiding on-site work in Soda Hall on January 4.

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.

November IRIS Server Patching

November 13, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, November 14th, 2023. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, November 15th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00am Wednesday, November 15th, depending on additional software updates.

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

On Wednesday, November 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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Issue with project/home filesystem exports

October 27, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Staff are investigating widespread reports that NFS-exported filesystems from the department fileserver became no longer accessible, as of yesterday evening. This affects both home directories and project storage shares.

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October IRIS Server Patching

October 6, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, October 10th, 2023. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday or Wednesday.

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

On Wednesday, October 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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September Windows Server Patching

September 8, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, September 12th, 2023. PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, September 13th, at 3:00 am.

WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, September 13th, depending on additional software updates.

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Various Linux servers (login, dhcp, DNS, SMTP, NTP) downtime Wednesday, August 9, 2023

August 7, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Various Linux servers will be down for patching and needed reboots to activate changes delivered by some RHEL patches.

The departmental dhcp server is scheduled for downtime from 10pm to 10:30pm. login.EECS.Berkeley.EDU is scheduled for downtime from 10:30pm to 11pm. Other Linux hosts (e.g. DNS servers cronus and rhea, and SMTP server gateway.eecs) may also be briefly unavailable while rebooting approximately 6-7pm.

We expect actual downtimes to be shorter than scheduled.

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August Windows Server Patching

August 7, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, August 8th, 2023. PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, August 9th, at 3:00 am.

WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, August 9th, depending on additional software updates.

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Retiring Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS)

July 31, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) is a legacy computer name registration and resolution service from Microsoft that maps computer NetBIOS names to IP addresses, and is implemented on our network with the machines wins1.eecs.berkeley.edu and wins2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Computers generally use DNS (Domain Name System) now, and most organizations stopped using WINS years ago.

We are planning to (finally) retire this legacy service on the following schedule:

Tuesday, August 8: remove configuration of WINS servers from EECS Domain Controllers, and from our NetApp fileservers. We don’t think any clients should notice this change, but we’ll be on the lookout for any issues that come up.
Tuesday, August 15: update DHCP to no longer specify WINS servers to DHCP clients. DHCP clients should have their network info updated over the next day or so, but will continue to resolve hostnames via DNS. So in general, we expect clients should notice no change. However, if your Windows client is relying on a shared Windows resource from a machine without a fixed IP name (for example, a shared lab printer attached to a Windows PC), you may lose access to that resource. Access to home.eecs, project.eecs, and printers on print.eecs will not be affected.
September 1-30: We will monitor any remaining WINS client traffic to wins1.eecs and wins2.eecs, and attempt to notify registered sysadmins to update clients accordingly.
Tuesday, October 3: turn off WINS.

We expect few people to be affected by the retirement of WINS, but if you do have a problem after one of the changes, feel free to contact the Helpdesk with any details.

July Windows Server Patching

July 7, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, July 11th, 2023. PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, July 12th, at 3:00 am.

WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, July 12th, depending on additional software updates.

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Urgent NetApp Fileserver Downtime, Saturday July 8, 2023

July 6, 2023 by Lars Rohrbach

We will be scheduling an urgent 4 hour Maintenance to update our NetApp fileserver from 8am to 12pm on Saturday, July 8, 2023. This update must be done prior to installing Microsoft Updates on AD Domain Controllers scheduled for release on Jul 11^th to secure the Netapp and maintain future connectivity with Microsoft AD Domain connection for our CIFS/SMB Shares.

All Home directories and Project shares (CIFS/SMB and NFS) may experience disconnection during the update that may cause data loss on active, open files. Please close your open files and save them before Saturday Morning. Services (e.g. webservice) that depend on this storage will also be down or unresponsive.

When maintenance is completed, NFS clients should automatically resume normal operation, but a reboot should help if they don’t. CIFS clients (such as Windows and MacOS) may need to remount filesystems, or simply be rebooted.

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