Instructional & Research Information Systems
Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, January 12th, 2016.
PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, January 13th, at 3:00 am.
WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, January 13th, depending on additional software updates.
[Read more…] about Jan 2016 Windows Server Patching
Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays,
the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Thursday,
December 24 to Friday, January 1st, reopening on Monday, January 4, 2015.
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. IRIS staff will
be taking advantage of the holiday to do maintenance on some systems
which will result in scattered outages, but any such downtime will be
separately announced and posted on the IRIS website.
The IRIS Helpdesk will close early at 3pm on Wednesday December 23,
and will reopen on Monday January 4. Problem reports can be left on the
Helpdesk voice mail (510-642-7777) or emailed to help@eecs, but staff
may not receive or reply to these messages until January 4.
Requests for new IRIS accounts that are received after 3pm December 23
will be processed on January 4, 2015.
During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers
will remain online (imail.eecs, inst.eecs, cory.eecs, and
fileservice.eecs). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor
inst@eecs email over the break. If you are unable to contact inst@eecs,
you can leave a message at 510-643-6141. Please be aware, though, that
staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 4.
We recommend that all desktop computers be shutdown during the Energy
Curtailment Period. If your Windows computer needs to stay on during
the break, we recommend that you check with your system administrator to
ensure that Automatic Updates are enabled with the option “Automatically
download the updates and install them on the schedule that I specify”
with a daily update schedule.
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
Enjoy your holiday break!
Campus has announced that starting on January 5, 2016, individual users will no longer be able to send email through the CalMail SMTP server (using calmail.berkeley.edu as outgoing SMTP server). See https://bconnected.berkeley.edu/news/important-information-bmail-users-using-calmail-send-mail
Affected users have been identified and contacted directly via email by the bConnected Service Team.
Use of the bMail web interface is not affected. Alternate mail clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, should use smtp.gmail.com as outgoing SMTP server, with a bConnected Key.
IRIS continues to maintain gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu as an alternate outgoing SMTP server. Some pointers for specific configuration of Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail can be found in our FAQ pages.
Resolved as of 2015-12-09 08:30:00
As part of our preparation for migration to new NetApp file storage hardware, we will be upgrading the OS on our existing Network Appliance file servers at 5pm Tuesday, December 1.
The OS will be upgraded from Data ONTAP version 8.1.2 to 8.2.4. Upgrade will be performed for project.eecs and home.eecs first, and then for cluster.eecs and inst-fs.eecs.
No general service interruption is expected, as our servers are configured in High-Availability pairs. Windows/SMB/CIFS users may experience a hiccup, if they have an active file transfer at the time of the upgrade; such a file transfer would terminate and need to be restarted.
Work is expected to be complete by 6:30pm.
[Read more…] about NetApp filer upgrade on December 1
The webserver hosting the department website is offline. Staff are investigating.
[Read more…] about EECS website server is down
Resolved as of 2015-11-11 08:00:00
We are investigating potential loss of data on archival project space, and examining options for restoration.
Archival project spaces include the following:
/arch/carmena /arch/visa /arch/simons-video /arch/yosef-archive /arch/secml /arch/inst-archives
[Read more…] about Potential loss of data on Archive project space
On Wednesday, October 28, campus migrated to a new set of Domain Name System (DNS) Infoblox appliances. In the process, domain names under their control were changed from the previous standard of mixed-case (e.g. violet.Berkeley.EDU) to all-lowercase (e.g. violet.berkeley.edu). This change was unannounced.
DNS names are “case insensitive”, but some applications that use DNS names are aware of case. In particular, NFS exports of our filesystems from home.eecs, project.eecs, and cluster.eecs, which are managed by netgroups in NIS, rely on case-sensitive name resolution to allow or deny access. The campus change caused exports to machines in subdomains such as Millennium.Berkeley.EDU, CITRIS.Berkeley.EDU, and IST.Berkeley.EDU to suddenly be denied. We have updated our own NIS netgroup entries to reflect the case changes, so expected NFS access has resumed.
Other applications that may be affected by this case change include web and database applications.
Campus has indicated that they have no plans to roll back the changes in Infoblox. They recommend that users update their applications to the new standard.
At this time, our independently-managed subdomains (EECS.Berkeley.EDU, CS.Berkeley.EDU, Banatao.Berkeley.EDU) continue to be mixed-case.
We are pleased to announce that we are moving to the next generation
of file storage in EECS.
Our current Network Appliance file storage hardware is approaching
its end of life, and our storage needs continue to grow.
Maintaining our own file storage systems has been valuable to research
and departmental operations, keeping costs down while providing centralized
storage with backups, snapshots, CIFS/NFS access, and room to grow.
Over the coming months, we will be migrating to a new cluster of NetApp
file servers, which will include disk-based backups and mirroring of current
data to the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Some changes to mounting and
some service downtime are expected, but details are still being worked out.
Look for upcoming announcements on how this migration might affect you
and your access to home.eecs, project.eecs and cluster.eecs.