We will upgrade Elabftw today between 11:00 and 17:00. Both elabftw.science.ru.nl and bigchemistryeln.nl are affected, and some downtime is expected. This is a major version upgrade, not a point release. If the upgrade does not go well, we will restore a backup and continue with Elabftw version 5 for the next couple of weeks. Update: both sites have been updated Apologies for the tsunami of old notifications that were previously held back by a bug, which was fixed in the v6 release!

Fileserver peck hosts several network shares. After the weekly reboot on Monday 5 October 2026 around 06:15Z, the machine did not fully start, causing the network shares to be inaccessible. Around 07:35Z we continued the boot process, and the network shares became available shortly after.

A security issue was found in our gitlab installation. However the version we have installed doesn’t look to be vulnerable (we are running the exploit ourselves and getting no results). Meanwhile we are working on upgrading our GitLab installation(s) to make it easier to follow newer GitLab releases. We are aware of the Mattermost/GitLab split, but without an alternative, we need Mattermost to keep on running. We are planning to upgrade gitlab.science.ru.nl on Thursday September 17th, this will involve some downtime for both gitlab and mattermost. (upgrade completed successfully)

This morning, we automatically sent a reminder for Science accounts that have a so-called end date in the near future, in this case 31 August 2026. We use the end date to find accounts that are not needed anymore. When both the end date and a grace period have passed, we delete the account. In the normal situation, this end date is automatically postponed if our internal systems indicate that the Science account is still needed in the future, for example, when a student has re-enrolled for the next year. For accounts that are managed by other, existing Science accounts, these owners can extend the end date of their managed logins using our self-service portal DIY. ...

Fileserver peck hosts several network shares. After the weekly reboot on Monday 3 August 2026 around 06:15Z, the machine did not fully start, causing the network shares to be inaccessible. After a manual reboot around 07:25Z and continuing the boot process, the machine’s network shares became available again around 07:35Z.

Our upstream certificate provider HARICA mis-issued several certificates (details) and is in the process of revoking said certificates. When manually renewing the certificate for helpdesk.science.ru.nl, we encountered a configuration oversight and accidentally misconfigured the webserver. This resulted in a redirection loop. We restored the working configuration from backup and reloaded the configuration for the webserver. Update Several thousand more cerficates have again been revoked. This is also led to HARICA being overloaded, because every one is trying to get their certificates re-issued. We are trying to update the certificates where we can.

One of the boot disks was failing and in the process of trying to resolve the issue (reseating the disk), its mirror suddenly went offline as well. After restoring that half, the server is running and we are busy getting a replacement part. In theory the server should not have to go down when the disk is replaced.

We will reboot clusternodes and possibly upgrade them from older ubuntu versions to ubuntu 24.04 in the last week of August 2026. If you have clusternodes and would like to plan for an upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to ubuntu 24.04, please let us know Update: the (first) reboot should take place between 10:00 and 11:00, if subsequent reboots are needed we will try to keep it within the same day timeframe. ...

We are going to upgrade fileserver “peck” on Friday June 19th 2026. The plan is to do it early in the morning, but you may experience some issues after the upgrade as well. Rebooting the client computer may solve the problem in that case. Please keep an eye on this page to check whether the upgrade is completed or not. The upgrade was finished, but it took a bit longer than expected. ...

This morning gitlab.science.ru.nl was not working correctly or at all. Finally a reboot of the host fixed all issues.