Planned outages for Victoria Day weekend 2013

As part of its Change Management plan, UBC IT has scheduled some upgrades for Victoria Day weekend. Three of the changes are expected to be seamless.

However, one of them ("Configuration changes to the A1/L1 router pair") will likely result in interruption to ECE's network connectivity on Saturday May 18, between 7 am and 9 am. As a result, services that rely on our NetApp filer, including home directories, e-mail, websites, and the Request Tracker ticket system will likely be temporarily unavailable during that time.

Since NFS clients often react poorly when a NFS server is unavailable, we advise users with Linux workstations that use NFS to either shut down their machines in advance or reboot after the scheduled outage.

Update 2013-05-18 14:00

Three of the four planned upgrades were successful, with only brief disruptions for ECE.

However, the firewall upgrade was not completed. While attempting to upgrade the A22/L22 firewall, a hardware failure was encountered, and the team focused on reconstructing it using a spare unit. As a result, there was insufficient time to upgrade A1/L1, the machine on which ECE's firewall runs, within the scheduled outage window. Therefore, ECE's firewall upgrade will probably be rescheduled for the next maintenance period in August.