[srcit_announce] SRCIT Downtime Update - Sept 12 2011

[James Light]

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James Light
System Engineer
Scientific and Research Computing
Stevens Institue of Technology
201-216-5684
srcit at stevens.edu
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This message contains important information regarding the expected availability
of the SRCIT systems tomorrow, Monday, September 12, 2011.

The brief summary is that the system will be unavailable from 7 AM until
approximately 12 PM. Then, for the remainder of the day, you may find yourself
locked out of the system momentarily, however this should only happen to each
user exactly once and will generally be for less than 5 minutes per user.

Please read the remainder of the email if you need more details on what this
means for you.
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The SRCIT System will be undergoing maintenance on Monday September 12th, 2011.
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In order to assist this maintenance, we are scheduling downtime for the hours of
7 AM until 12 PM on the above date. However, the system's availability will be
limited from 12 PM for the remainder of the day.

>From the hours of 7 AM until approximately 12 PM, the entire SRCIT system will be
unavailable. After 12 PM we will be tranferring filesystems to a new storage
medium.

In order to keep the system as useable as possible during the data migration
period, only the owners / users of one particular filesystem will be locked out
at a time.

This means that while your home directory's data is being migrated, you will be
prevented from logging into your account. However, once your data has been
migrated you will regain access to your account and the next user
will be locked out while their data is transferred.

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If you are logged in when your account is selected for migration, you will
notice that your home directory (or project space in /projects) has become a
read-only filesystem and you may be forcibly logged out.

We have tried to implement a system whereby a logged in user will receive a
notification message and given 120 seconds to save all their current work and
log out, but the system does not seem to work in every situation, thus you may
be forcibly logged out without seeing the notification. We apologize for this
and hope to have the notification system working better in the future.
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>From 7 AM until approximately 12 PM the following services will be unavailable:
    * User Home Directories and User Data 
    * Project Spaces and Projects Data
    * Login to Linux Lab hosts
    * Personal Websites
    * Trac
    * SSH key-based authentication
    * SVN
    * srcit-experimental-mail email services
    * Matlab
    * Mathematica

>From 12 PM until approximately 11:59 PM, one user or one project space at a time
will be marked read-only until the data for that filesystem has been migrated.
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Our tests have shown an average transfer rate of 10 Gigs / minute. Thus, if you
want to know approximately how long your project data, home directory data and
login functionalities will be disabled, you should give at least 1 minute for
every 10 Gigs of data that you have stored on our system.

Also keep in mind that becuase of some of the glue that went into making this
possible, you may experience slightly longer delays due to the code working
around users that are logged in, systems that have crashed, network anomalies
and other unpredictable events.
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At the start of the downtime, all client machines will be rebooted and user
logins will be disabled until 12 PM. 

We thus recommend that you log off the SRCIT system in advance of 7 AM
so as to avoid any confusion and possible loss of your data.

This downtime was scheduled to 
    * upgrade the existing file server infrastructure
    * expand available space for research projects
    * increase reliabilty and availability of users' data


Thank you for working with us while we transfer your data to an improved
infrastructure.

     -SRCIT Staff
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Questions? Comments?
http://help.stevens.edu/
Type: SRCIT
srcit at stevens.edu