At the moment, we are solving the problem.

During the night of wednesday on thursday a power outage resulted in a network outage in the basement computing facilities. The power was restored to the network equipment using a bypass thus circumventing the UPS at about 09:15. Further checks implied that most servers had not become powerless so that most services became automatically available again. Network drivers on “bundle” had to be restarted in order to get access to home directories for a large number of users. Furthermore, several websites had to be restarted which made it possible for PC’s to boot properly. During the day, an unrelated issue with the RAID storage of “plus” has been fixed as well granting access to the following network shares: sofie, ams*, molchem, mb*, encapson, milkun4, snn, neuropi, digicd. carta, … Since wireless devices were unable to acquire IP addresses, i.e. gain access to the network, a split-brain situation was diagnosed within the DHCP service which was resolved around 13:00.

Next Friday morning, the home server “pile” will be rebooted. There are problems with the snapshots, which could make a reboot take more time. Therefore we schedule the reboot for early next Friday.

Yesterday evening, horde webmail appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to spammers. First we stopped horde. This morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde.

During the weekly reboot (monday mornings), the server got stuck in the BIOS.

In order to test new software, the Peage top-up unit near the Huygens restaurant was switched to maintenance mode. This unit is not used often yet, therefore this wil not have caused problems. Students that wanted to top-up their Peage account, could do that only elsewhere on campus. See the http://www.ru.nl/peage Peage website], locations are the halls of the Erasmus, Spinoza and Library buildings.

Next Tuesday morning, the home server “pile” will be replaced by a new, more powerful server. Because the data have been synchronized with the new server, there will not be much downtime.

The downtime below has been postponed, because we had a few questions on the new server, that could not be answered in time. To be continued… Next Tuesday morning, the home server “pile” will be replaced by a new, more powerful server. Because the data have been synchronized with the new server, there will not be much downtime. The new server should be very dependable: hardware RAID-6, double processors and power supplies and a 5-year support contract from the supplier. The performance has improved, e.g. by using hardware RAID with a 1 GB write cache with battery backup.

This morning, horde webmail appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because naive users gave their Science password to spammers. After we found out who the users were and had them change their password, we decide to also replace a defective cpu fan. Therefore also Mailman mailing lists will be down from 13:00 to 14:00 hours.