News - Oct 2001

Oct 16 2001 - From 10:00 AM to Noon on Tuesday, October 16th, Borg will be down for hardware maintenance. The internal disk which broke on Friday October 12 will be replaced.

Oct 14 2001 - Tigger is now running on new hardware (an IBM PSeries 620 model 6F1 server). The new machine has roughly 3 times the computing capacity of the old and twice the RAM.

In order to accommodate the cutover, we had to arrange tigger's disks in a "non-optimal" manner, so reading and writing files may not appear to be faster just yet. We hope to tune this up next weekend, when we migrate the mail inboxes to newer, faster disks.

Please report any problems that you feel may be related to this upgrade to systems@uic.edu

Oct 13 2001 - On Friday October 12th during scheduled system maintenance, one of borg's internal disks stopped working and must be replaced. At 8:00 AM on Saturday, October 13th, borg will be down to allow for the insertion of a replacement. On Sunday, October 14th, borg will be down for four to eight hours while systems reloads the data onto the replacement disk.

Oct 12 2001 - Our central email/web/database server named "tigger" will be unavailable this Sunday (10/14) starting at 8AM and finishing no earlier than 4PM.

We need this extended outage so that we can attempt to upgrade tigger from the currently over-loaded hardware to a new server that will have three times the computing power of the old. We have scheduled this outage during daylight hours to help insure that we can put our best effort into this much needed upgrade. (Note that we had originally planned to upgrade the machine in early August, but purchasing delays set back our schedule.)

The "www.uic.edu" web pages will still work, generally, during the upgrade but the following services will not be available:

* Email "inboxes" on tigger (whether from pine, Eudora or WebMail) * Personal web pages stored in home directories on tigger * Most Web pages that involve form submission or processing CGI) * The "www.uic.edu" search engine capabilities * FTP access for updating any www.uic.edu web pages

We regret inconveniences caused by this outage, but we feel the benefits of the upgrade, should we succeed, will be worth the effort.

Oct 12 2001 - From 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Friday, October 12th, Borg will be down for hardware and software maintenance.

Oct 09 2001 - ACCC Staff, We have been getting reports that UIC staff, UIC-Peoria staff and some folks in the Springfield area are losing their connection to the AITS Mainframe and the AITS Core Apps OR cannot get connected. This has been an ongoing problem for the last week and a half. Our Network support staff have not been able to identify any problems with the AITS Network. The Mainframe and Core Apps servers are located at the RRB building at UIC. Is there some instability on the ACCC backbone at UIC? Jodi Barnhill, Help Desk Consultant Administrative Information Technology Services University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 333-7459

Oct 05 2001 - On Friday, October 5th at 5:30 PM, UIC access to the web will be unavailable for TWO to FIVE minutes.

Oct 03 2001 - ACCC staff, FYI, there is a telecommunications problem with 1-800 numbers affecting the entire Midwest. Chicago clients may want to email us there problems and WE'LL CALL THEM back. Thank you for your help in spreading the word to UIC clients. Jodi Barnhill, Help Desk Consultant Administrative Information Technology Services University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 333-7459