Rob McNicholas

The EECS Department’s Calendar server is currently unavailable. Staff are investigating. We have no uptime estimate at this time.
[Read more…] about EECS Calendar Service Interruption

The EECS Department’s Oracle Calendar (formerly Corporate Time) server is currently down for emergency maintenance. We expect it to be available again no later than the morning of Friday, February 24.
[Read more…] about Calendar Server Down For Maintenance

Oracle has just released their January “Critical Patch Update.” IRIS staff will be applying this update to our Oracle database beginning at 6pm on Sunday, Jan 22. We estimate this process will take three to four hours, but could take up to six. During this time, applications which rely on the database will be unavailable. This includes the Network database query and request forms, and the Account request and query forms.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

Please send questions or comments to help@eecs.
[Read more…] about IRIS Web Site Downtime, Jan 22, 6pm-midnight

Due to the Winter Holidays, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Monday 12/24/2005 to Monday 01/02/2006.

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. We expect full service to resume on January 2nd.

The EECS Department’s Computer Helpdesk will be closed during this time. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (2-7777) or emailed to help@eecs, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until January 2nd.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers should remain online (imail.eecs, inst.eecs, cory.eecs, mamba.eecs and fileservice.eecs). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs over the break. If you are unable to contact inst@eecs, you can leave a message at 2-9543. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 2nd.

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. For all windows systems, especially mobile laptops, we also suggest that you consider installing personal firewalls.

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!

The Department’s web server was experiencing some trouble communicating with the Oracle Calendar server, and was restarted several times today between 3pm and 5pm. Users may have noticed the web server was occasionally unresponsive during this period.

We believe it is stable for now. We will be making some configuration changes in the next few days to isolate the main server from the Oracle calendar processes to prevent such interruptions in the future.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Oracle has just released their quarterly patch update, which contains fixes for some “critical” vulnerabilities. We will be taking our Oracle installation down on Thursday, Oct 20 at 5:30pm for patching. This is a very large patch and could take several hours to install, so I am scheduling 4.5 hours of downtime. I am hoping it will not take that long, but please do not plan on having access to the network database before 10pm Thursday.

This will affect all forms that are normally available on the IRIS network page.

Please send any questions to IMG.

-Rob

On Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 10pm, the EECS Department’s web server
will be unavailable for a short time when it is rebooted after routine maintenance. Downtime should not exceed 30 minutes.

This will affect all web pages hosted on:

www.eecs.berkeley.edu
www.cs.berkeley.edu
ee.berkeley.edu
titanium.cs.berkeley.edu
blackouts.eecs.berkeley.edu
quantum.cs.berkeley.edu
www-bisc.cs.berkeley.edu
www-w2k.cs.berkeley.edu
tenet.berkeley.edu
safetp.cs.berkeley.edu
aima.eecs.berkeley.edu
networks.eecs.berkeley.edu
orange.eecs.berkeley.edu
osq.cs.berkeley.edu
bebop.cs.berkeley.edu
www.object-recognition.org
harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu
cc05.cs.berkeley.edu
lithonet.eecs.berkeley.edu
nanophotonics.eecs.berkeley.edu
sipc.eecs.berkeley.edu
theory.eecs.berkeley.edu
web1.eecs.berkeley.edu

This web site (https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu) will be down Sunday, May 1 from 10pm to 12 midnight for routine maintenance.

During this time, all services provided by iris.eecs.berkeley.edu will be unavailable. Note that this includes the main IRIS web site, the EECS network database, and the IRIS purchasing database.

Please send comments to img@eecs.

The department’s SMTP relay, gateway.EECS.Berkeley.Edu, accepts incoming connections on the SMTP Submission port
(port 587).

Most of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are now blocking or
filtering the default SMTP port (25) at their network borders, making
the use of gateway.eecs impossible for some home users. Those who are
being affected by their ISP’s blocks may find relief by using this
alternate port 587.

See the IRIS Software FAQ for instructions on how to configure your email client.

[Read more…] about Alternate SMTP port available on gateway.EECS