This morning, users reported that mail from smtp.science.ru.nl to hotmail users was being bounced by hotmail. We have tried to let the hotmail administrators change this fast, but when this took too long, we changed the IP-number of our smtp-server.

A hardware failure of a boot disk of the fileserver stack was reported Friday morning June 22. We decided to repair this after working hours. Thus at approximately 17:00 the defective boot disk was removed from the machine and replaced by a spare one. Enabling the disk, making it bootable, restoring file systems and rebooting the machine (after removing all snapshots) took a lot of time. When this was resolved Friday evening, the NFS/SMB fileservice was not active on the mounted filesystems. It took a reboot Sunday evening to resolve all problems.

A hardware failure of the server poly was reported at 2012-06-21 14:12. After a restart of the machine, it stopped working again. No more recoveries were attempted and an identical spare machine was outfitted with the disks from the defective server. Disks had to be synchronized before making the machine available again.

A power failure in a rack in a server room brought some C&CZ servers down. After less than two hours all problems were dealt with. Affected systems ware mainly: postvak (Science mail server), bundle (user homedisk), heap/stack (network discs), resser/kookpunt/brievenbus/rustug (mail transport smtp servers)

A defective hard disc has been replaced in a server, but the server needs to be rebooted to ensure that this is reboot proof. The MySQL database of roughly 70 websites will therefore be down for a short time. Since this server also provides the Kerberos authentication for Linux clients, Linux clients might encounter service interruptions during a short period.

The UCI network management reports that at this moment the incoming version of Eduroam doesn’t work for iPhone/iPad/iPod. A solution is being worked upon. Eduroam incoming means that one uses the wireless network of a remote institute, with authentication (login/password) being checked by RU or Science.

Thursday July 7, around 13.00 hours the server “plenty” could not be reached. Because this server serves the “xpsoftware” share for the Managed Windows PC’s, all these PC’s had a problem. After the server was restarted and the disks had been checked, it was available again at 14:26.

In order to improve the cooling of a server room, we plan to move three racks of Science servers a few meters on Sunday morning, July 3. We will have to switch off a lot of servers temporarily. Therefore several services will be unavailable some time starting July 3, 09:00 hours. We expect the downtime will last until 10:00 hours for servers with a lot of different users. The cn compute cluster will probably be fully operational again at 12:00 hours. ...

This morning, in the network hub for Huygens South a UPS (battery power supply) went down, which made a set of network switches loose power. Because of this, users in Huygens wing 1 and spin-off companies lost their connection to the network. After bypassing the UPS, everything was up and running again at 11:30. We are still searching for the exact origin of this outage.

You can’t reach certain fixed phones at the university right now, mobile phones and Skype do work ok though.