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IRIS

Instructional & Research Information Systems

Lars Rohrbach

Migration of Home Directories — First Batch

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As
previously announced, we are in process of migrating our central file storage
system to a new cluster of Network Appliance hardware.

We have identified 703 home directories on home.eecs.berkeley.edu that are
not under immediate, active use, and will be migrating them to the new file
storage beginning late tonight, January 22, 2016. Active use was assessed using
timestamps of top level home directory, last Active Directory login, last CIFS access,
NFS mounts and netstat output. We anticipate that most of the migrations
in this first batch will take just a few minutes, and that the whole first batch
will be complete before Monday.

You may view the list of home directories that are part of this first-batch migration here:
List of home directories to migrate

During the migration, access to the old location will be disabled; you will
be able to access the new location immediately, as files are copied over.

Many users may never notice a difference. If you manually mount your
home directory, please read on for changes.
If you have questions about some of the technical details,
please contact your system administrator(s), or contact help@eecs.

1) NFS exports will change. AMD/automaps will be updated accordingly.
Note that this implies a re-mount.

usernames    Old                           New
a-h      home:/vol/home/eecs/<user>     home10:/home10/<user>
i-q      home:/vol/home/eecs/<user>     home20:/home20/<user>
r-z      home:/vol/home/eecs/<user>     home30:/home30/<user>

2) CIFS/Windows access will change similarly. Active Directory will be updated
accordingly, so that corresponding H: drives will be mounted from the new
location.

usernames    Old                    New
a-h      \\home\<user>        \\home10\<user>
i-q      \\home\<user>        \\home20\<user>
r-z      \\home\<user>        \\home30\<user>

We plan to schedule the migration of the remaining home directories on home.eecs
in the coming week. Please stay tuned for more information.
[Read more…] about Migration of Home Directories — First Batch

IT Support During Winter 2015 Energy Curtailment

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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!

CalMail ending outgoing SMTP service

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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.

Dec 2015 Windows Server Patching

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Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, December 8th, 2015.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, December 9th, at 3:00 am.

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

Resolved as of 2015-12-09 08:30:00

NetApp filer upgrade on December 1

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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

Nov 2015 Windows Server Patching

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Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, November 10th, 2015.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, November 11th, at 3:00 am.

WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, November 11th, depending on additional software updates.

Resolved as of 2015-11-11 08:00:00

Campus DNS change caused some NFS mount trouble

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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.