This is a recurrence of the problem from Saturday night. We believe it is caused by old Novell clients. Information System will be pushing out an update.

Info Systems will take ALL Novell servers off-line early Saturday morning, 12/6, to make system images to enable recovery from any future catastrophic failures. Details:

DATE: Sat, December 6, 2003
BEG-TIME: About 7:00am
END-TIME: About 8:30am

IMPACT: All Novell services, including network files (P:, G:, Z: drives), network printing will NOT be available during the outage period.

Also, because the EMU email server and Oracle calendar server login authentications are provided by the Novell directory service, access to the EMU email services, including WebMail, will NOT be available during the outage period.

Users WILL be able to access the Internet, Blackboard, CampusWeb and the Sadie (library catalog).

All Novell servers, except FSAPPS, should be returned to service by 8:30am. FSAPPS will remain off-line while it hardware for it is upgraded. See FSAPPS details described in a separate outage report for 12/06/03.
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All Novell servers used by students, faculty and staff (except FSAPPS) were returned to service at 8:25am, 12/06/03. The system images are now complete and up-to-date.

Info Systems will be migrating the contents of the FSAPPS server to an upgraded set of hardware. This is not a new server, but has more power and capacity than the current FSAPPS server.

The applications on FSAPPS are:

-Goldmine Contact Mgmt (Admiss, ADCP, Seminary)
-TMA (Phys Plant)
-Past Perfect Museum Software (Museum)
-Survey Pro (Institutional Research)

No other systems should be affected by this outage. All users should be able to login to Novell during the outage. Faculty and Staff who login will likely see messages indicating that attempts to map drives on FSAPPS have failed.

Faculty/Staff users will have complete access to P:, G: and Z: drives.

The upgrade will begin shortly after 6:00am. If all goes well we believe the FSAPPS server will be returned to service by noon.

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FSAPPS upgrade completed at 11:15am, 45 minutes ahead of projected completion time.

FS file server was rebooted due to high CPU utilization. Users were noticing slow response times and sometimes were unable to open certain files or volumes.

The novell file server FS was rebooted. All users were unable to print using Novell print queues. This might have been caused because of the switch “-AV” used with DSREPAIR. This switch was recommended in a TID due to problems with space calculations in the preparation of running a full unattended repair.

The Novell server FSAPPS needs to be rebooted.

This needs to be done to resolve a -771 error when attempting to do a full unattended repair. If this doesn’t work maybe “bouncing” the DS will work.

Server didn’t go down gracefully. I had to dismount the volumes, then power it off. After it came back up, DSREPAIR ran successfully.

After everything synced, I changed FS to be the Master replica and made FSAPPS a R/W.

The Novell server for students will be taken off-line early Friday morning (11/14) for a hardware upgrade. During the outage logins to Novell for students will NOT work – most of the time. There will be times when you can log in, but please DON’T! If you have a file open there is a good chance it will be lost or corrupted. Meaning you get to do the work again!

Windows XP computers in labs can be used by use of a special temporary login and password that is posted on the lab doors.

The upgrade will begin shortly after 6am and if all goes well the ST server should be returned to service by noon. If problems are encountered this could be extended by several hours.

The current status of this ST Novell server upgrade will be communicated to the campus via the Critical Information Alert (CIA) system with notices on on the WebMail desktop, EMU Connection page and EMU Home Page (for on-campus users).

The only network services affected by this outage will be the STUDENT services for Novell file and print.

The upgrade completed properly. The old ST server hardware has been unplugged and disconnected from the network. The object id problem from FS didn’t show up here, however the object ID was invalid, but was able to be resolved running DSREPAIR. The outline of what was done:

1. backup and image ST
2. Remove DS from ST.
3. Do migration.
4. Verify volumes and id’s using DSREPAIR
5. Install DS onto ST
6. Install software products – powerchute, novastor, etc
7. Verify everything is working.
8. Make image of ST.

The Novell server NS had larger disks installed.

The four 36 gig disks were replaced with four 73 gig disks. This meant the raid needed to be rebuilt. Since the data section was smaller than 100G, I was able to use server magic. Following is the order of what was done:
I created a tape backup of the server
Ccreated an image of the sys, c: partition.
Deleted most of the data from the data partition.
Created an image of the data partition.
Swapped out disks.
Created the new array and logical drives using server magic – which allows me to increase the size of the netware partition.
Installed both images.
Used Novastor to restore the data to the “SERVIMG” and “IMAGES” volumes.
(this created some problems when trying to restore data to more than 1 volume at a time.)

This now doubled the space to store system images.

Dan Marple Jr.