Monthly Archives: March 2004

Problems with Long Distance provider

Phone System

Long distance outage from 3:00-4:30, rerouting changes were made. Users can now make long distance calls, but inbound long distance service is not working.

Our service provider has been contacted. We hope to have the problem solved soon.

9:00 A.M 8/20/04 – The circuit appears to be stable. Long distance service is currently working. We will monitor the traffic until 5:00 P.M. this afternoon. If no problems arise we will close our trouble ticket with Qwest at that time.

Webmail outage

Email

10:30AM, MON 3/22: A small routine upgrade procedure failed on the webmail server this morning. While this was being fixed, an additional problem occurred which is very serious and will take a few hours to correct. This affects only accessibility and will not result in lost email.

04:00PM, MON 3/22: Indications are that the WebMail server hardware failed during the routine procedure this morning. WebMail services will be re-deployed to the mail server itself. One server will temporarily be doing the work of two. Performance will be impacted — the extent of the slowed performance is unclear.

06:00PM, MON 3/22: Webmail services are available for on-campus users, but off-campus users will not be able to access webmail until Tuesday, 3/23. The temporary solution will result in slower e-mail server performance. Please be patient. One server is now doing the work previously done by two. Info Systems is working to develop a plan for returning a second e-mail server to service with appropriate hardware.

11:00AM, TUE 3/23: Webmail is available both ON and OFF campus. However, performance is slow and SENDING e-mail messages may fail in some instances. Technicians are working to reconfigure server hardware to address these performance issues. It is anticipated that this work will be completed by end of day today (Tue, 3/23).

02:30PM, TUE 3/23: Webmail services moved off the main mail server to another web server. Main mail server should be able to reduce the queues of messages for delivery. Quirks with WebMail (i.e. attachments, groups, inbox display) should be fixed. Users should reboot their computers before connecting to WebMail to assure proper connectivity.

Novell Server Service Pack 7 Upgrade

Network

Novell Service Pack 7 needs to be installed.

The planned outage for this Service Pack upgrade is Saturday morning, 03/20/2004.

The process will require several hours of down time. Systems affected will be Novell file servers and all other systems that authenticate with LDAP (i.e. email, calendar, certain web services).

Plans are to begin shortly before 7am on Saturday, 3/20. If all goes well all systems should return to service by 1:00pm.

During the outage the following network services will NOT be available:

NOVELL FILE/PRINT: (P:, G:, Z: drives and network printers)

EMAIL: LDAP authentication will be down so users cannot login to email. No email will be lost because it will be held in queue.

CALENDAR: The Oracle Calendar LDAP authentication will be down. Users will not be able to login to the calendar server.

COMPUTER LABS: Windows computers located in computer labs will not be operational because they require LOGIN to operate. LOGIN is provided by Novell which will not be available during the outage.

CERTAIN WEB SERVICES: A few functions on the EMU web site require user login (i.e. access to web directory from off-campus). These rely on LDAP which will be unavailable.

All other network services should remain operational (i.e. Internet access for browsing and IM).

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All systems were updated – no major problems.

Both NS and ST had to be powered off during restart. Is this due to the KVM switch again?

Ran DSrepair on FS – no problems

Changed the time server for ST – the existing one wasn’t responding.

Upgraded FS first, then FSAPPS and LD (at the same time), then ST and NS (at the same time).

On ST in the NWSERVER directory, renamed DELLMGR.NLM to DELLMGR.NL1.

Since the memory hadn’t arrived for LD, it wasn’t added – will need to be added some morning after we ever get it. This will max the server out to 2G.

The “backup” UPS wasn’t added to the second rack since the power source wasn’t able to be determined – waiting on phys plant to either verify what else is on that breaker or to add a new 20A circuit.