Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Scheduled downtime: Dec 18, Dec 27-28, Jan 3-4

We found out yesterday that, due to construction, Hearst Gym will have no power on Dec 27-28 and Jan 3-4. Unfortunately, all OCF services will be affected by the power outage.

We're looking into ways to reduce the impact, but currently you should expect the following impacts:

  • Web hosting: All web hosting, including student group hosting, will be unavailable. We're working on providing a descriptive error page, rather than simply having requests time out.
  • Email hosting: Email sent to students or to groups with virtually-hosted mail will be delayed until the outage ends. Senders might receive a notice that delivery has been delayed, but you will still receive the messages shortly after the power returns.
These services will be completely unavailable:
  • Database (MySQL) access
  • Shell (SSH/SFTP to tsunami)
  • F/OSS Mirrors (mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu)
We're working now to try to minimize the impact of the outage, and will post updates here. Please email us if you have any questions.

Update 12/10: We are scheduling downtime during the evening of Thursday, December 18th to test our ability to start all servers and services remotely. Total downtime should be less than 30 minutes.

Update 12/18: Maintenance for tonight is completed. Total downtime was about 45 minutes (instead of the expected 30) due to a problem with a switch after we restored power. The good news is that we caught it now rather than in a week when nobody will be around to fix it. Everything else worked as expected.