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IRIS

Instructional & Research Information Systems

Multiple Services Offline for About Eight Hours

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The EECS website, FTP server, Jabber server and Sympa mailing-list server were offline for about eight hours on Sunday, Dec 28, 2008 beginning at 2:48 p.m.

The virtualization cluster that hosts these services experienced a failure when the network switch that supplies its management network was rebooted during the [scheduled network maintenance](https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/news/2246-eecs-network-maintenance-sunday-dec). We didn’t notice the failure until this evening, but were able to restore service quickly once we realized what was wrong.

I apologize for the length of the downtime and am planning on working to make the cluster more robust and improve our notification and monitoring so that any future issues will be noticed more quickly.

Resolved as of 2008-12-28 22:32:00

EECS Network Maintenance Sunday Dec 28th

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We will be upgrading the network in Soda Hall beginning at 2PM on Sunday, Dec 28th. There will be several network outages as most switches in Soda will be upgraded at this time. While each outage is expected to be brief, there will be several so the network throughout EECS and BWRC may be unstable during this time. This effects both wired and wireless networking. We are allowing a 4 hour window as there are so many switches to upgrade. All work should be complete by 6PM. We regret any inconvenience this may cause.
[Read more…] about EECS Network Maintenance Sunday Dec 28th

Two EECS switches Offline Briefly for Maintenance

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The EECS switches that are serving north east side of Soda 5th floor and of Soda 6th floor will all experience brief outages on Monday, Dec 22, 2008 beginning at 7:00a.m. due to system maintenance.

The wired network will be offline and users will experience a brief (less than 5 minutes) outage while the switch is rebooted to apply new operating system code. Since some wireless networking devices are also fed by those two devices, some of wireless users will experience a brief outage as well.

Resolved as of 2008-12-22 07:30:00

First floor switch reboot, Dec 22

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There will be a reboot of a switch (calp115-2.EECS.Berkeley.EDU) on the first floor of Cory Hall on Monday at 8:00 am, to clear an error. The switch should recover within a few minutes so it is likely not to affect anyone.

EECS Website, FTP, Sympa and Jabber Offline Briefly for Maintenance

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The EECS website, EECS FTP server, Sympa mailing-lists and Jabber (IM) service will all experience brief outages on Thursday, Dec 18, 2008 beginning at 10:00p.m. due to system maintenance.

These services won’t all be offline simultaneously, but each will experience a brief (less than 5 minutes) outage while the server hosting it is rebooted to apply operating system patches.
[Read more…] about EECS Website, FTP, Sympa and Jabber Offline Briefly for Maintenance

Security alert: Internet Explorer 0-Day exploit

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A new Internet Explorer (IE) exploit is being used to compromise
Windows systems. At this time, the only preventative option available
is to use a browser other than IE such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari.
Microsoft has announced it will release an out-of-cycle patch for this
bug tomorrow, December 17. System and Network Security strongly
encourages everyone who uses IE to be sure to apply this patch as soon
as it becomes available.

This article is reposted from IST. The original article is available at
http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/Spring2009/IE-0day

Computing Support During Winter Break

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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 25 to
Sunday, January 4, reopening on Monday, January 5, 2009.

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 EECS Department’s Computing Helpdesk will be closed beginning Monday,
December 22nd, and will reopen on Monday, January 5th. 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 5th.

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 643-6141. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to
respond or reply to messages until January 5th.

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!