Rob McNicholas

Brief outages to Mailing Lists, IRIS Website, Jabber Wed Sep 20 6pm

September 20, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Routine Red Hat Linux operating system patches have been released which require system restarts. Starting at 6pm Wednesday, Sep 20, IDSG will be patching and rebooting affected servers. The following services will experience brief outages of 10 minutes or less between 6pm and 7pm.

* Department mailing list services (lists.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* Department jabber/xmpp service (jabber.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* IRIS website (iris.eecs.berkeley.edu)

Resolved as of 2017-09-20 18:06:00

Brief outages to various IRIS services, Sep 7, 6pm

September 7, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Routine Red Hat Linux operating system patches have been released which require system reboots. Starting at 6pm Thursday, Sep 7, IDSG will be patching and rebooting affected servers. The following services will experience brief outages of 15 minutes or less between 6pm and 7pm.

* Personal and Project web services (people.eecs, apps.eecs, and all IRIS-hosted project websites)
* Department mailing list services (lists.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* Department ftp server (ftp.eecs / ftp.cs.berkeley.edu)
* Department jabber/xmpp service (jabber.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* IRIS website (iris.eecs.berkeley.edu)
[Read more…] about Brief outages to various IRIS services, Sep 7, 6pm

Dept Webserver Issues, Restarting at 12noon

August 18, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

The Department webserver which hosts people.eecs.berkeley.edu and most other project websites in the department has hung twice today, once around 8:30am and once around 10:15am. It will be patched and restarted at 12 noon.

A new version of the Apache web server software has just been released which fixes a vulnerability that could be responsible for the problems. Apache will be patched and restarted today at noon, and the webserver will be unavailable for approximately 10 minutes during this time.

Resolved as of 2017-08-18 12:06:00

LDAP upgrade tonight, 6pm

August 15, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

The LDAP servers behind the load balancer for ldap.eecs.berkeley.edu will be upgraded tonight between 6pm and 8pm. Beginning at 6pm a final backup will be made of the data on the old servers, loaded into the new servers, and then the old servers will be retired. No service interruption is expected as the load balancer will be used to route requests to the right machines during the transition.

This is a change in both operating system and OpenLDAP software version. We have been testing the new servers for several months and do not expect any problems, but please inform help@eecs if you have any issues after the upgrade.

One enhancement is the addition of the memberOf overlay. This puts a new attribute (memberOf) in each person’s record to reflect LDAP groups they are members of, and is needed for some authorization situations.

Unix groups and automount maps are now also published in LDAP. Documentation is being prepared which will describe how to configure sssd on Unix/Linux machines to use these new OUs in LDAP instead of NIS.
[Read more…] about LDAP upgrade tonight, 6pm

Brief outages to some IRIS services, Aug 2 6pm-7pm

August 2, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Routine Red Hat Linux operating system patches have been released which require system reboots. Starting at 6pm Wednesday, Aug 2, IDSG will be patching and rebooting affected servers. The following services will experience brief outages of 10 minutes or less between 6pm and 7pm.

Campus losing power, IRIS services shutting down

August 2, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Due to a fire threatening our transformers, PG&E has advised campus we will be losing power.

IRIS is taking proactive steps to shut down as much equipment safely before we totally lose power.

See https://www.nixle.us/9HHZX for the warning from UCPD.
[Read more…] about Campus losing power, IRIS services shutting down

Brief outages to various IRIS services tonight, 6pm

July 3, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Routine Red Hat Linux operating system patches have been released which require system reboots. Starting at 6pm Monday, July 3, IDSG will be patching and rebooting affected servers. The following services will experience brief outages of 10 minutes or less between 6pm and 7pm.

* Personal and Project web services (people.eecs, apps.eecs, and all IRIS-hosted project websites)
* Department mailing list services (lists.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* Department ftp server (ftp.eecs / ftp.cs.berkeley.edu)
* Department jabber/xmpp service (jabber.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* IRIS website (iris.eecs.berkeley.edu)

Resolved as of 2017-07-03 18:07:00

New Procedure for Changing Unix Passwords and Shells

June 21, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

A new web page has been deployed to allow IRIS account holders to change their Unix password or shell. This page replaces the old procedure of logging into the server passwd.cs.berkeley.edu.

The new page is available now [on the IRIS website](https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/selfserve/nispasswd/). You may authenticate to this page using either your EECS Windows / LDAP password, or by using your CalNet passphrase.

Please direct any questions or comments to the IRIS helpdesk at help@eecs.berkeley.edu.

Brief outages to various IRIS services, May 30, 6pm

May 31, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

Routine Red Hat Linux operating system patches have been released which require system reboots. Starting at 6pm Wednesday, May 31, IDSG will be patching and rebooting affected servers. The following services will experience brief outages of 10 minutes or less between 6pm and 7pm.

* Personal and Project web services (people.eecs, apps.eecs, and all IRIS-hosted project websites)
* Department mailing list services (lists.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* Department wiki service (wiki.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* Department ftp server (ftp.eecs / ftp.cs.berkeley.edu)
* Department jabber/xmpp service (jabber.eecs.berkeley.edu)
* IRIS website (iris.eecs.berkeley.edu)

Resolved as of 2017-05-31 18:16:00

IRIS Unix groups renumbering, June 1, 2017

May 24, 2017 by Rob McNicholas

IRIS would like to inform to all sysadmins in the department about some upcoming changes to our Unix groups which may affect some of your users and systems. These changes will primarily affect people who login to Unix servers and manage their files using Unix tools, or administrators of Unix servers that rely on the department NIS mammoth domain, or who have made local copies of the mammoth group file.

The issue is that we are changing the names and gid numbering of some Unix groups. Some old groups were created with gid numbers that are now conflicting with reserved groups in current releases of operating systems popular in the department, such as Red Hat / CentOS and Ubuntu. Effective June 1, 2017, any IRIS-created group with a gid below 1000 will be renamed “was-XXX” and a new group created with the original name, and the same gid + 10,000. All users will be temporarily added to both groups. Our goal is to make a path now for people to upgrade to the newer groups and sunset the old groups and gids. We hope to have all users migrate their own files to the new groups, or ask IRIS to do it for them, by June 1, 2018, which gives us about 1 year to fully complete the transition. All groups with GIDs below 1000 will be removed from the mammoth group file at that time. (See examples at the end of this message.)

We will also be changing the primary group (the group listed in the passwd file) for all users with a primary gid < 1000, to the new gid for the same group. This may affect users access to un-migrated files since their processes will now run with the new gid. Migrating any files or access controls to the new group numbering scheme should resolve any issues that arise. On May 23rd, we sent messages directly to affected users informing them about the changes and providing instructions on how to update their files. This targeted email listed the specific group or groups that are changing that affect that user. Some reminders and updates will be posted on the IRIS website. More detailed updates and discussion can happen on the new moderated mailing list gid-updates@lists.eecs.berkeley.edu. Any interested parties can subscribe by visiting the list’s homepage here: https://lists.eecs.berkeley.edu/sympa/info/gid-updates Here are some concrete examples. Currently: * grad:*:116:
* staff:*:772:

Between June 1 2017, and June 1 2018:

* was-grad:*:116:
* was-staff:*:772:
* grad:*:10116:
* staff:*:10772:

After June 1, 2018

* grad:*:10116:
* staff:*:10772:
[Read more…] about IRIS Unix groups renumbering, June 1, 2017