Disruption to Informatics services based in Appleton Tower

Following on from the recent reminder of disruption to Informatics and central University systems on Tuesday 10th January, here is a bit more detail.

A fault was recently identified in the Appleton Tower “essential services” electrical supply, which amongst other things powers the basement server room which houses many Informatics and central University systems. Unfortunately a complete shut-down of this supply is required in order to repair the fault.

This work has been scheduled for the evening of 10th January.

The following websites will be unavailable (from 5pm) for the duration of the scheduled work:

Informatics Web CMS service, wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk
LFCS website, wcms.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk
ANC website, www.anc.ed.ac.uk
CISA website, www.cisa.inf.ed.ac.uk
HCRC website, www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk
ILCC website, www.ilcc.inf.ed.ac.uk
Peter Buneman 2013 Workshop, pbf2013.inf.ed.ac.uk
CLASSiC Project website, www.classic-project.org
EMIME project website, www.emime.org
Articulatory data corpus, www.mngu0.org
Ultrax Speech project, www.ultrax-speech.org

The CDT cluster is also affected, and will be powered down from 4.30pm on the 10th. Some additional maintenance will also be carried out, and it is unlikely that the whole cluster will be back up before 11am the following morning (although individual James nodes may be available before then).

Note that some home directories will also be unavailable from 5pm for the duration, mostly those of students and visitors. To check your home directory, (on a DICE machine) use the “homedir” command, and look for one of the affected hosts in the output – the second field contains a host/partition pair, and if the host (the bit before “/”) is one of keto, ladon, naga, or cetus, then you will be affected. For example, an affected directory would show as:
% homedir fred (Fred Smith) : naga/vicepa : /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/f/fred : free 1320.2G (used 39%) %
If you are affected, but would prefer not to be, contact Computing Support (who may be able to move your home directory to an unaffected server). Note that this is aimed primarily at new staff or visitors who may still have a home directory on an affected server, it is unlikely that UG student requests will be acceded to.

Note that the student.compute server will also be unavailable from 4.30pm on the 10th.

Other servers and services affected:

Login server (ssh.inf)
Student login server (student.ssh.inf)
Remote access server (nx.inf)
Projects database (projects.inf)
ANC server (trout.inf)

Note that connectivity to Forrest Hill & Wilkie may be lost, as might wireless and ‘phones.

Note also that it is assumed (unless otherwise stated) that all services will be unavailable from 4:30pm on the 10th, and returned to normal service at or before the end of the scheduled “At Risk” time of 12:00pm (noon) on the 11th.

Details of the work scheduled by IS can be found at http://reports.is.ed.ac.uk/alerts/index.cfm?fuseaction=view_alert&alert_id=6406