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Instructional & Research Information Systems

Unexpected Outage of Dept. Website, FTP, and Mailing Lists

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Due to some necessary maintenance to some SAN hardware, the department’s website, FTP server, and mailing lists experienced brief outages this evening beginning around 6:24 p.m.

The website and FTP server were only offline for about six minutes, but mail sent to lists handled by lists.eecs.berkeley.edu (Sympa) during the outage may have been delayed up to 45 minutes. I apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused.

The server hosting the department web and FTP services along with the one hosting the database used by Sympa went offline when they unintentionally lost their connection to the SAN during maintenance. The maintenance was last-minute and shouldn’t have caused any disruption, but it didn’t quite go as planned.

Hardware has arrived to allow us to make redundant connections to the SAN for these services which will make them more resilient in future situations like this one. We plan to have the hardware installed and in use soon.

Resolved as of 2008-10-08 19:20:00

Wireless Network Slowdowns

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Some locations for EECS supported wireless services were very slow or disrupted due to a controller issue. The areas affected were HMMB, BWRC, Brewed Awakenings and some of the upper floors of Soda. A controller reboot appears to have solved the issue.

Resolved as of 2008-10-06 13:42:00

Campus VPN migration will temporarily disrupt EECS VPN service

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SCHED OUTAGE campus-wide; Tue 30 Sep 2008; 0252 – 0600

Equipment: Campus/Law/EECS VPN
Location: campus-wide;
Date: Tue 30 Sep 2008; Start: 0252 End: 0600

Description:
On Tuesday 30 September 2008, between 2:52am and 6:00am, the Campus VPN service will be migrating to a pair of load-balanced VPN concentrators. The window begins with our standard nightly campus DNS reload, and extends forward from there as clients pick up the replacement IP address for the new VPN service. By 6am, it is expected that no clients will still be attempting to use the former VPN service for new connections, though existing connections should still
operate as expected until they close.

The cutover should actually be outage-free for all VPN users of the ucbfull, ucbsplit, and Law VPN profiles. However, because the EECS VPN profile involves a specific network configuration that will need to be migrated live, users of the EECS VPN profile will not be functional until towards the end of the outage window.

System and network administrators that operate host- or network-based firewalls should note that the general-use client IP address range of the new VPN service is different. Any firewall
rules that reference the old client subnet of 136.152.208.0/24 should be updated to reference 136.152.208.0/22 instead, which will encompass the union of the old and new VPN services’ client IP addresses. (The EECS VPN will retain its existing client subnet.)

No VPN client changes should be necessary in this migration.

David Paul Zimmerman
IST

New Webmail Client Available

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An upgraded web mail interface to the department’s IMAP server has been in testing since July at https://webmail.eecs.berkeley.edu .

This interface has a different look and feel from the old interface. It also allows the user to manage mail filters on the IMAP server. These rules are processed prior to any other rules that are in place, such as the rules on the server that processes SPAM.

No problems have been reported, so we are concluding the test period and making this the preferred webmail client.

On Monday, September 29th, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Mail and related URLs will begin forwarding to this new interface.

On November 20th, the old interface at https://imap.eecs.berkeley.edu will be permanently
turned off.

As part of this upgrade, the URL for changing the
SPAM/Virus/Trash deletion has been moved to
https://webmail.EECS.Berkeley.EDU:442.

Please send any questions or comments to help@eecs.

EECS Website, FTP, Jabber, and Sympa Offline for Urgent SAN Maintenance

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Due to some urgent maintenance to the SAN, the EECS Website, EECS FTP server, Jabber, and Sympa (mailing lists) services will be offline from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, September 23, 2008.

The servers hosting the aforementioned services lack redundant connections to the SAN which prevents them from remaining in service during the maintenance. We realize this is an unfortunate limitation and are procuring new hardware which will add the redundancy necessary to handle similar situations more gracefully in the future.

Our apologies for the short-notice and inconvenience.
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Initial Support for MacOS X Leopard

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The EECS Department is pleased to announce initial support for MacOS
X Leopard (10.5.3 or better). We also would like to announce that
a limited number of Leopard licenses and media are available for
purchase at the Helpdesk in 395 Cory.

With the 10.5.3 update to MacOS X Leopard, Macs are once again able
to mount shares on our department fileservers, home.eecs and
project.eecs. It appears that significant improvements to X11
have been done in Leopard since the initial release as well.

Licenses for MacOSX Leopard are available for purchase at the
Helpdesk for $39; the media (the actual Install DVD) will be $15
extra. For comparison, note that the retail price of a license
with a DVD is $129. If you wish to purchase just the license, you
may check out a loaner DVD from the Helpdesk for installation.
Purchasers may pay by chartstring or personal check (there is a small
surcharge for paying by check), but we recommend calling ahead to
make sure we still have licenses or media available.

The Helpdesk can be reached at 2-7777.