Scheduled Power Outage (Jun 2012)

Electricity in the Kaiser and MacLeod Buildings is off for maintenance. Several ECE services, such as SMTP (outgoing e-mail), SMB (Windows network drives), download, and mirrors, are unavailable. Other services are operating at reduced capacity.

The scheduled outage window is 8 am to 8 pm, though service may be restored sooner.

The original e-mail announcement:

Hi,

On June 9, 2012, there will be a planned electrical outage affecting many buildings in this area of campus including ICICS, Kaiser and MacLeod. Power will be unavailable from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and the buildings will be closed and locked (ie. no fob access and everyone is to vacate the building for safety reasons).

Offices and labs: The technical staff request that people shut down equipment (computers, printers, etc) in their offices when they leave before the outage. Please unplug the equipment to avoid potential damage from power spikes when electricity is restored. If you will be away from your office during the week leading up to the outage, please contact help@ece.ubc.ca to request that your equipment be turned off by the staff.

ECE's core services: Servers and network connectivity to the rest of campus and the Internet will be off for an hour or two before the outage and resume as quickly as we can afterwards. Mail service, and department-provided compute services will be unavailable. We will attempt to maintain a minimal web presence.

Chris Dumont - Manager, Technical and Physical Resources

Update Jun 10 02:00

Most computing services are operational. Some servers and workstations that are housed in server rooms for research groups will be brought up later today.

One server suffered filesystem damage following the power outage. As a result, download and GADS for ECE and BME remain unavailable, with no estimated time to repair.

We had initially hoped to keep more services operating through the power outage, since one of ECE's three server rooms has a generator. However, the switch from mains power to emergency power failed, and power to that server room was interrupted. We will be reviewing our procedures to improve reliability during future power outages.

Update Jun 10 19:30

All servers and workstations in server rooms have been turned back on. GADS for ECE and BME are now running again. download remains unavailable, with no estimated time to repair.

In addition, the ECE network is not available in the Brimacombe Building and Pulp and Paper Centre, and will remain so until Monday morning. ECE IT Services does not have physical access to restart the networking equipment in those buildings.

Update Jul 9 15:00

Service on download.ece.ubc.ca has been restored. Thank you for your patience.