Lars Rohrbach

Soda Hall Electrical Shutdown and BWRC Network Outage, 9/18 7PM

September 16, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Following up on the previous scheduled power outage, the electricians still need to try addressing the failed circuit breaker on the first floor of Soda, since first floor lights and Soda Hall main supply and exhaust fans remain off, and parts of the building are becoming unbearably hot due to lack of airflow.

Similarly to last time, Soda Hall will be completely without power beginning at 7PM. Please shut down your systems before 7PM on Thursday to avoid any issues. This includes all systems in the Soda 340 server room. Power is expected to be restored by 8:15PM.

We expect all IRIS services to remain available, due to a combination of battery backups and redundant servers in other buildings.

BWRC networks will be offline during this shutdown, as they are dependent on Soda Hall.

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

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Temporary loss of DHCP network support for some desktops, Sep 13

September 15, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Late Saturday, September 13, an issue arose with our automatic DHCP support of registered desktop machines (wired network support of desktops/workstations without fixed IP addresses).

This appears to have affected devices with hostnames beginning with letters r through z, which have network registrations older than one year. Those devices would have lost their DHCP lease, and so would have lost their network connection, sometime early Sunday.

We have restored a known-good version of the DHCP support file for these hosts, and they should generally come back online with no intervention needed. Some devices may need to be rebooted, if they don’t come back online automatically.

Staff are continuing to investigate the root cause of the issue.

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September IRIS Server Patching

September 5, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, September 9th, 2025. Various IRIS Windows and Linux servers will be patched and rebooted Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, September 10th, 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) 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, September 11th, the departmental DHCP server is scheduled for downtime from about 9am to 9:30am (actual downtime is expected to be shorter than scheduled). Linux login servers login.eecs/login-mfa.eecs will also be patched and rebooted around this time.

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August IRIS Server Patching

August 8, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, August 12th, 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, August 13th, 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, August 14th, 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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July IRIS Server Patching

July 8, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, July 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, July 9th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Thursday, July 10th, 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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June IRIS Server Patching

June 6, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, June 10th, 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, June 11th, at 3:00am. WINTERM may be unavailable until 10:00am Wednesday, depending on additional software updates.

On Thursday, June 12th, 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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NetApp Fileserver Maintenance, Saturday May 24, 2025

May 19, 2025 by Lars Rohrbach

We are scheduling a NetApp ONTAP upgrade, to apply a necessary update to our NetApp fileserver, from 8am to 12pm on Saturday, May 24, 2025.

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 temporarily 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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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.

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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