CSL Current Service News

This document outlines important announcements, notices, and information pertaining to CSL services. This includes details about downtime, reboots, and upgrades and changes to software and services that may have an affect on our users.

Any questions or comments should be directed to lab@cs.wisc.edu.

Partial AFS Outage - March 9, 2009

One CSL AFS file server (miter.cs.wisc.edu) went down shortly after 1:10p this afternoon.

Users with home directories on this file server would have seen error messages about "No such directory" or "unable to stat ." or other related errors.

The server has come back up as of 1:55p. Users still experiencing problems should email lab@cs.wisc.edu.

CSL now offering password-based users on postgres.cs.wisc.edu - February 4, 2009

The CSL is now offering support for password-based users on postgres.cs.wisc.edu. People can now request and manage separate users that connect via password-authentication. This allows greater flexibility in applications and is more in line with what several applications expect.

For more information and specifics on CSL policy, please read http://www.cs.wisc.edu/CSDocs/PostgreSQLPasswordUsers.

To request a password-based user, please fill out the "Request a Password-Based PostgreSQL User" webform on https://www-auth.cs.wisc.edu/forms.

As always, any further questions, problems, or comments should be directed to lab@cs.wisc.edu.

CS Unit 3 Power Outage Wednesday, January 7, 2009 4-7am

Because of necessary maintenance to the CS building's power infrastructure, electricity to unit 3 is scheduled to be shut off for three hours starting Wednesday morning at 4am.

Servers in 2360 should remain online, as they are separately powered. As a result, offsite users should still have access to services such as email during this outage. However, office workstations and their supporting network infrastructure will not be available while the work progresses.

CSL Staff will be present Wednesday morning to deal with any issues that may arise when the power is turned back on.

The lab recommends that users log out of their machines before the downtime.

Please email lab@cs.wisc.edu with questions or comments.

CSL IMAP Sever Hardware Upgrade, Nov 18th, 2008, 10pm

The IMAP Server upgrade was completed at 00:30. No known problems were encounted

The CSL IMAP server will be undergoing a hardware upgrade Tuesday, 11/18 at 10pm. This will result in a service outage that is estimated to take 3 hours.

The server will be migrating off of the emergency hardware that was deployed in early October to replace the failed mail server. The new hardware is faster and more reliable than the current hardware, and has been tested over the past week without issues. Because of these improvements and its stability, we would like to deploy this hardware as soon as possible.

Should users encounter any email issues after the upgrade, please contact the CSL at lab@cs.wisc.edu. If email is completely unavailable, phone the lab at 262-2389.

CSL IMAP Outages Sunday, Oct. 26th

The CSL IMAP server suffered a power supply failure early Sunday morning which caused an unexpected mail service outage. As soon as the CSL was aware of the problem, staff were on site and were working to bring the server up - IMAP returned to service by noon.

Following this outage, the server developed a file system error Sunday night between 6-7pm that created another service outage and necessitated further downtime due to the size of the affected system. Lab staff were again on site and working on its return to service until it was fixed around 1am.

The server has been up since and no further issues have been reported.

The CSL ordered replacement hardware for this server last Thursday and expects it to arrive soon. This hardware should improve the reliability and performance of the mail server going forward.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. Please continue to send reports about service problems or oddities to lab@cs.wisc.edu as they are greatly beneficial in helping us debug these issues.

IMAP Mail Issues and Resolution, 9/25 to 10/9/2008

Please see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/CSDocs/IMapSep29 for a full timeline.