News - Sep 2007

Sep 29 2007 - We had a serious problem with one of the "back end" servers that comprise mailserv on Friday from about 5:30pm until midnight. The good news is that no user data was lost.

An array of disks that we had added last week to improve performance froze up without notice around 5:30pm. Several attempts to reset the devices and reboot the server failed to clear up the problem. We spent several hours investigating the problem, which was among the most difficult we've seen in years. Ultimately we discovered that an older SCSI (I/O) cable that we had used to connect the extra disks was behind the very sporadic and seemingly unexplainable behavior we were seeing. We now believe it was a mistake to use an older cable that was not designed to handle the speeds of new SCSI disk devices.

We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences causes by this outage - which gives us new motivation to move forward with long overdue plans to replace some of the older mailserv back end servers and disk drives.

Sep 19 2007 - We developed a plan to relieve the current Pharos system performance. We are going to start upgrading labs room by room to the new Pharos server. This week, we will tackle the SEL computer labs before moving on to SCE (our busiest computer lab). We would like to move quickly and so we appreciate your patience during this migration. In the meantime, if you send a document to print in one lab, please use that lab's printer as it is not possible to transfer print jobs between Pharos 6 and Pharos 7 systems. In appreciation of your patience, when you print in the upgraded labs, your U-Print balance will start at $15 (as it does at the beginning of each term).

Sep 19 2007 - This week's ACCC Computer Training Workshops schedule includes a variety of hands-on workshops. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.accc.uic.edu/workshops or email workshops@uic.edu.

Mon  9/24  1-3pm   SEL2058  Introduction to MATLAB - Focus on Graphics
Tue  9/25  10-12pm BGRC179  Introduction to Microsoft Excel: Creating 
                            Spreadsheets and Graphs
Tue  9/25  2-4pm   SEL2058  Introduction to SPSS - Analyzing Data
Wed  9/26  9-11am  SEL2058  Introduction to SAS - The Point & Click 
                            Interface
Wed  9/26  1-3pm   SEL2058  Introduction to Microsoft Excel: Creating 
                            Spreadsheets and Graphs
Fri  9/28  10-12pm BGRC179  Simple Statistics with Excel

Workshops
Academic Computing and Communications Center
University of Illinois at Chicago
http://www.accc.uic.edu

Sep 17 2007 - We're experiencing problems with a MAILSERV I/O device and need to reboot. MAILSERV should be up by 9:15pm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sep 17 2007 -

In recent days, the U-Print server has performed poorly under the printing load. We are fully aware of the performance and we have a plan to improve the situation.

In the short term for the next few days we will begin to introduce a new server into the printing system. Once the new hardware is in place we will see a dramatic improvement in printing performance. There will be a little bit of migration pain but we feel that the pain is worth the gain in performance.

At this time we don't have a specific timeline on when the new server will be in place. We will have a better idea on Tuesday and provide updates as we move forward. In the short term, please print only what's necessary so as to minimize the demand on the server during peak hours (11 AM-4PM). Thank you for your cooperation.

Sep 17 2007 - Mailserv will be down for system work tonight 12:01am-2am (i.e. early Monday morning).

Sep 16 2007 - Blackboard was down for maintenance on Sunday, September 16, from approximately 6 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. We replaced broken memory modules. While doing this we encountered another problem with the configuration of the hardware. With assistance from our hardware service vendor we repaired this problem also. We have redundant servers for Blackboard but unfortunately they share files which reside on the machine which required service.

Sep 14 2007 - Blackboard will be down for maintenance on Sunday, September 16, from 6 A.M. to 11 A.M. We will be replacing broken memory modules. We have redundant servers for Blackboard but unfortunately they all share files which reside on the machine which requires service.

Sep 12 2007 - Our LDAP server dealing with the public whitepages suffered a corrupted database. We're recovering from backup now.

This affects the Phonbook search from the UIC web page, and some email clients that might do direct ldap lookups. It does not affect logons and passwords.

Sep 12 2007 - The ldap whitepages database has been restored, and is functioning again.

Sep 11 2007 - Register, free-of-charge, at http://www.accc.uic.edu/workshops.

Mon  9/10  12-2pm  BGRC179  Introduction to SPSS - Structuring Data
Mon  9/10  3-5pm   BGRC179  Intoduction to SAS - The Programming Language 
Tue  9/11  10-12pm BGRC179  Introduction to PowerPoint
Tue  9/11  2-4pm   SEL2058  Introduction to MATLAB - Focus on Matrices 
Wed  9/12  11-12pm BGRC179  Digital Audio Editing and Podcasting with Audacity
Wed  9/12  1-3pm   BGRC179  Introduction to Microsoft Excel: Creating 
                            Spreadsheets and Graphs
Thu  9/13  10-12pm SEL2058  Introduction to PowerPoint
Fri  9/14  10-12pm BGRC179  Introduction to SPSS - Analyzing Data