Planned Maintenance on Sunday, April 1 & Monday, April 2, 20001 may cause interruption in lab service

Recently we began experiencing problems with many of our lab and public Macs. We initially thought this was due to a file corruption on a server. After extensive work, we have found an additional correlation to network upgrades and bandwidth issues. As more machines are connected to our systems the additional load is being noticed in loss of connection and usability. This is especially seen on the public & lab Macs, as they are highly managed. Simply put, demand is exceeding capacity, making small problems get magnified. We are now attempting to find ways of using our existing equipment to its fullest capacity until additional capacity can be added. (Due to the current financial situation, it is unclear when that may be.)

On Sunday, April 1, at approximately 9:00 AM we will be making server configuration changes that will require a server reboot. During this reboot the public Macs will not be available. Our plan is to have this finished before labs open at 1:00 PM on Sunday. This change should make it possible to do the work on Monday without taking the labs down for long periods.

On Monday, April 2, We are having a specialist come in to assist with optimization & configuration of our systems to see if there is anything that we can do to improve performance. Most of this work can be done without taking the labs down for long periods. It may be necessary to reboot some servers throughout the day so there may be interruptions in service. It would be advisable to save often if using lab Macs on Monday.

Depending on the outcome of Monday's tests, attitional scheduled outages may occur. Check back here for details.

Several people have reported problems related to this to CHFA|TECH. Thanks! Although we know about this particular problem, and are working extensively to fix it, sometimes we don't know about problems until they have existed for quite some time. It If won't know about a problem, we can't fix it.

CHFA|TECH regrets any inconvenience that these problems have caused. We know that you rely on the computers for your daily work, and expect a stable system. Making the system stable is a top priority for us, and we have already spent more than forty man hours on this project. Please bear with us as we endeavor to get you the best possible service with the available resources.

Information posted by: Steven Larson, 3/30/2001 2:46:46 AM.