Department Webservice

Multiple Services Offline for About Eight Hours

December 28, 2008 by IRIS Staff

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 Website, FTP, Sympa and Jabber Offline Briefly for Maintenance

December 18, 2008 by IRIS Staff

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.
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Brief Interruption of Some IRIS Services

October 28, 2008 by IRIS Staff

The department website, Jabber and Sympa services were briefly interrupted this morning due to an issue with the cluster that provides them.

Each service was unavailable for a few minutes between 10:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. as the server cluster they run on was restarted. Restarting the cluster was necessary to alleviate a deadlock in the clustered file system used by the services.

My apologies for any inconvenience this has caused, I’m looking into how to avoid this situation in the future and bring more stability to the cluster.

Resolved as of 2008-10-28 10:30:00

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

October 8, 2008 by IRIS Staff

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

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

September 23, 2008 by IRIS Staff

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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Department Webserver Upgrade, Monday, Sep 15

September 15, 2008 by Rob McNicholas

On Monday, Sep 15 at 6pm, IRIS will be performing an upgrade of the department web service on www.eecs.berkeley.edu and www.cs.berkeley.edu. The service will be moved onto a new cluster of redundant hardware, and the server software will be upgraded to Apache 2.2 (from 2.0).

We expect no downtime, but web services might be unstable around 6pm, but should stabilize no later than 6:15pm.

Most people will not notice any change, except that the web server will be much faster. And while the old server was very reliable, the new cluster gives us an even more robust and flexible environment.

This upgrade pertains to all [research websites](https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/10-services/web-technotes.html#upgrade) that are hosted on this server.

The software upgrade will affect a small number of people who have put passwords on part of their personal website. We will be contacting those individuals directly by email to let them know [what they will need to change](https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/10-services/web-technotes.html#upgrade).

If you would like access to the new server in advance to test out your personal website, please contact help@eecs and we will send you the necessary information.

Resolved as of 2008-09-15 18:12:00

Coeus/Project Downtime

August 20, 2008 by IRIS Staff

Attention System Administrators,

On Wednesday, August 20th from 6am-8am, IDSG will be migrating production file service of home directories and project space to the new NetApp filers. There will be downtime during this migration that will impact the majority of users in the department. Please evaluate the impact for your users and notify them of those details. A much shorter public announcement will be going out soon to the entire EECS community indicating that local System Administrators will be letting them know of any specific information as to how it will impact their work.

The following services will be affected:

– coeus
– project
– sww (not winsww)
– argus
– www.eecs and www.cs web servers
– the IRIS website

The following changes apply:

1. COEUS

– coeus.EECS.Berkeley.EDU will be replaced by home.EECS.Berkeley.EDU.

– NFS access will change from coeus:/vol/vol0/eecs/username to home:/eecs/username

– The amd and automaps will be appropriately changed.

– CIFS access will change from \\\\\\COEUS\HOME\username to
\\\\\\HOME\username

– The old hostname coeus will be a CNAME to home.EECS.Berkeley.EDU until September 20th.

2. PROJECT

– NFS access will change from project:/vol/vol[02]/projspace to project:/proj/projspace

**NOTE**: A few mount points will change in a different way. See the end of this announcement for details.

**NOTE2**: If your project spaces are merged, the details will be worked out with you directly outside of this announcement.

– The amd and automaps will be appropriately changed.

– CIFS share names will not be affected.

This announcement may be followed by additional updates if additional technical details need to be publicized. Certain requests may be delayed beyond the normal response time (e.g. amd/automap change requests, new user creation, project space creation, etc.) during the 2 weeks prior to the migration.

The downtimes for different services will be different. There will be one or more additional announcements as services get restored to allow early access to the appropriate systems. E.g. the actual downtime for coeus/home is expected to be only a few minutes.

This list will receive notice when access is restored.

Sysadmins should be ready to reboot systems that need to remount filesystems between 7:30 and 8 AM. CIFS access should resume during that time as well. The CIFS share names will not change and therefore should not require a reboot for those systems.

Be advised that there are a number of follow-up tasks after the outage, which could result in slow response from these systems.

If you experience problems during or after the outage, or have
additional questions – please contact Helpdesk at help@eecs or 2-7777 or 395 Cory.

Project Space Changes Exempt from the Default Rule
OLD	NEW
project:/vol/vol2/231images	project:/proj/deptweb/231images
project:/vol/vol0/bokor	project:/proj/bokor/bokor
project:/vol/vol0/bokorgroup	project:/proj/bokor/bokorgroup
project:/vol/vol2/brass	project:/proj/brass-a
project:/vol/vol2/jordan	project:/proj/jordan-a
project:/vol/vol2/landay	project:/proj/landay-a
project:/vol/vol0/sequin-a	project:/proj/sequin/sequin
project:/vol/vol2/sequin-a	project:/proj/sequin/sequin-a
project:/vol/vol2/sequin	project:/proj/sequin/sequin-b
project:/vol/vol2/smith	project:/proj/smith-b
project:/vol/vol0/yelick	project:/proj/yelick-old

CalAgenda will be down from 7 to 9 p.m. on Monday April 7th

April 7, 2008 by IRIS Staff

The CalAgenda will be down this coming Monday night, April 7, 2008 from 7 to 9 p.m. This outage is necessary to fix the system’s slow response time.

The cause of the recent CalAgenda slowness has been found to be congested access to their disk storage. The CalAgenda Tech Support team hope to cure that this Monday by switching to new disk storage with uncongested access.