Header Search Widget

IRIS

Instructional & Research Information Systems

Cory Hall Network Maintenance Outage, Tues. 11/17 9PM

by

There will be a maintenance outage of the Cory Hall network on Tuesday, November 17th at 9PM in order to apply a vendor-suggested software update to the building router. The update is intended to fix a bug regarding in-band SSH management of the router.

If this update is successful, we will be performing a similar process in Soda and Sutardja Dai Halls in the near future.

The outage is expected to last for less than ten minutes. Please contact help@eecs.berkeley.edu with any questions or concerns.
[Read more…] about Cory Hall Network Maintenance Outage, Tues. 11/17 9PM

Brief outage to numerous services, Thur Nov 12 7pm

by

IDSG’s Linux Servers will be patched and rebooted tonight starting at 7pm. Numerous services will experience brief outages between 7pm and 8pm, including:

web service from www.eecs.berkeley.edu, iris.eecs.berkeley.edu, apps.eecs.berkeley.edu, wiki.eecs.berkeley.edu

Mailing Lists from lists.eecs.berkeley.edu

Jabber/XMPP service from jabber.eecs.berkeley.edu

ftp service from ftp.eecs.berkeley.edu

No service should be down for more than 10 minutes.

During this maintenance window, the [Openfire](http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp) software on jabber.eecs will also be upgraded from version 3.9.3 to version 3.10.2, [which should fix some outstanding bugs](http://www.igniterealtime.org/builds/openfire/docs/latest/changelog.html).





Resolved as of 2015-11-12 20:00:00

Nov 2015 Windows Server Patching

by

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, November 10th, 2015.

PRINT, WINTERM and WDS will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, November 11th, at 3:00 am.

WINTERM may be unavailable till 10:00 am Wednesday, November 11th, depending on additional software updates.

Resolved as of 2015-11-11 08:00:00

CoE WordPress Hosting Service

by

The College of Engineering is now offering no-cost WordPress website hosting to research groups, institutes, faculty labs, student groups and other units affiliated with Berkeley Engineering. Hosting is managed by WP Engine, a premier commercial vendor delivering WordPress hosting with speed, security, innovative technology and top-notch customer service.

If you’d like to request a do-it-yourself site on this hosting plan, please email coe-wp@berkeley.edu.

This service is best suited to standalone sites seeking the flexibility and ease of use that WordPress provides, but that don’t require the deep customization (nor the resulting development bandwidth) of a made-to-order HTML or Drupal website. Although the WP Engine-hosted sites will be within the berkeley.edu domain, the service is not intended to replace individual faculty pages within each department’s existing website.

While the college is providing the hosting service, this is otherwise a do-it-yourself web solution. Individual site owners are wholly responsible for their site’s content, design, themes, plugins and routine maintenance (like keeping plugins up to date). WordPress and WP Engine provide tools that make this maintenance one-click simple, but it will be up to you to use them. CoE will not be providing design or development services, or building or maintaining sites.

At the moment, this hosting service is best suited to migrating existing WordPress that are currently hosted elsewhere, or to creating simple new sites based on existing WordPress themes and designs (free or commercial). We have already launched 50 such sites, and WP Engine’s migration tools make the process fairly simple.

We’re also working on creating a custom Berkeley Engineering theme for WordPress, which will allow sites to follow the visual lead of the engineering.berkeley.edu site while gaining access to custom content types for people, courses, facilities, research and publications. Work on this custom theme is ongoing, and probably won’t be completed until the end of this semester. (Although you could create a new site now with a generic theme, and then convert it to the Berkeley Engineering theme at a later date, that will entail significantly more work than waiting to create the site directly into the the custom theme.)

If you are interested in taking advantage of this WordPress hosting opportunity, either now or after the Berkeley Engineering theme is completed, please email coe-wp@berkeley.edu to start the conversation.

Campus DNS change caused some NFS mount trouble

by

On Wednesday, October 28, campus migrated to a new set of Domain Name System (DNS) Infoblox appliances. In the process, domain names under their control were changed from the previous standard of mixed-case (e.g. violet.Berkeley.EDU) to all-lowercase (e.g. violet.berkeley.edu). This change was unannounced.

DNS names are “case insensitive”, but some applications that use DNS names are aware of case. In particular, NFS exports of our filesystems from home.eecs, project.eecs, and cluster.eecs, which are managed by netgroups in NIS, rely on case-sensitive name resolution to allow or deny access. The campus change caused exports to machines in subdomains such as Millennium.Berkeley.EDU, CITRIS.Berkeley.EDU, and IST.Berkeley.EDU to suddenly be denied. We have updated our own NIS netgroup entries to reflect the case changes, so expected NFS access has resumed.

Other applications that may be affected by this case change include web and database applications.

Campus has indicated that they have no plans to roll back the changes in Infoblox. They recommend that users update their applications to the new standard.

At this time, our independently-managed subdomains (EECS.Berkeley.EDU, CS.Berkeley.EDU, Banatao.Berkeley.EDU) continue to be mixed-case.