IRIS

Instructional & Research Information Systems

EECS

News

IT Support During Winter 2020 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 Wednesday, December 23 to Monday, January 4, reopening on Tuesday, January 5, 2021.

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.

The IRIS Helpdesk will close early at noon on Tuesday, December 22, and will reopen on Tuesday, January 5. 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 5.

Requests for new IRIS accounts that are received after 5pm December 21 may not be processed until January 5, 2021.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (for details, see the Instructional website). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs email over the break. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 5.

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

Information regarding campus IT closures is available here: https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/it-schedule-winter-holidays-curtailment

Happy Holidays!

DNS and NTP servers reboot for NIS retirement Tuesday December 1, 2020 6:45am to 7:15am

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In conjunction with the scheduled NIS retirement, cronus and
rhea (DNS and NTP servers) will be rebooted.

Info about the NIS retirement is at –
https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/news/ongoing/nis-retirement-in-eecs-dec-2020/

cronus is scheduled for downtime from 6:45am-7:00am.

rhea is scheduled for downtime from 7:00am-7:15am.

We expect actual downtimes to be less than scheduled.

[Read more…] about DNS and NTP servers reboot for NIS retirement Tuesday December 1, 2020 6:45am to 7:15am

Wi-Fi Outage, Cory and Sutardja Dai Halls

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From around 6:15 this morning, all wi-fi networks are offline in the following locations:

  • Cory Hall 1F
  • Cory Hall 3F
  • Cory Hall 5F
  • Sutardja Dai Hall 2-7F
  • SDH NanoLab 5/6F

We have determined the root cause (a firmware bug) but are unable to resolve the issue remotely. We expect service to be restored later this morning.

Update: Service has been restored in all areas as of 10:45AM. Please email help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you notice any continuing issues.

End of Support for RHEL 6

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) support ends November 30, 2020 –
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:2319

Running a device with an operating system past its end of life is not compliant with the “software patch updates” standard of the campus MSSND (Minimum Security Standards for Networked Devices) at
http://security.berkeley.edu/MinStds

Devices currently running RHEL 6 can be

1) removed from the network
2) upgraded to a supported operating system
3) obtain paid extended RHEL 6 support and obtain an approved exception to the campus MSSND.

The campus ISO (Information Security Office) has a RHEL 6 end of life web page –
https://security.berkeley.edu/news/red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-end-life

We expect ISO to start issuing vulnerability tickets for devices running RHEL 6 after November 30 2020. By the second week of December, we expect that ISO will be requesting that RHEL 6 devices be removed from the network,

If you have any questions, please contact the IRIS Helpdesk (help@eecs).