News - Nov 2005

Nov 27 2004 - Tigger is down from 9AM-12Noon on Saturday Nov 27 for softwar maintenance.

Nov 12 2004 - FYI

Sorry for the late notice, but a recently ordered redundant power supply has arrived and we want to get it installed ASAP in order to prevent any repeat of the power supply failure on Wednesday. Also just arrived, and to be installed tonight, are additional memory modules that will double tigger's RAM capacity and should give a good boost to performance.

Note that we are still living with a sporadic "filesystem corruption" problem that has caused tigger to crash a few times since our upgrade to AIX V5.2. As you may know, we had applied a special IBM software patch to address this problem Wednesday morning. But that patch only made matters worse resulting in several failures Wednesday.

As Murphy would have it, the failing power supply and the bad software patch coincided, so it was difficult to determine which problem was causing the trouble. Eventually, a combination of a new power supply and removal of the bad patch led us back to where we started: still living with a sporadic file system corruption problem.

IBM is analyzing a core dump from Wednesday and hopefully they will be able to figure out why the "fix" actually made things worse, and they will fix the fix.

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we work through these issues.

Nov 10 2004 - Tigger is having hardware problems. It is still up, but will continue to have intermittent problems. We have a call into our service provider for parts. We do not have an estimate at this time as to when tigger will be back up.

Nov 10 2004 - Tigger was down several times today Nov. 10 between 9:15 and 16:00. The instability was caused by 2 problems: a broken power supply, and a bad software patch. The broken power supply was replaced. For several months we have been experiencing a problem which would occasionally cause corruption of a file system when the system was heavily loaded and we were waiting for IBM to resolve the problem. Recently, a patch to address this problem was made available and last night we installed it. Now it appears that the patch caused the filesystem to become unusable so today we backed-out of the installation of the patch. We expect tigger to be stable again.

Nov 10 2004 - Tigger was having intermittent problems this morning. The problem was fixed at 10:25am.

Nov 10 2004 - We are still experiencing intermittent problems with Tigger. We do not have an estimate at this time as to when the problem will be fixed.

Nov 09 2004 - Tigger will be down from 11PM until 1AM Tonight (Tuesday November 9) to apply software patches which we hope will correct the cause of the two crashes we've had in the past two days, and also correct the problem we had getting the mail spool back online after this morning's crash.

Nov 04 2004 - Blackboard was down today from around 10:30 to 14:30 and it is now working normally. We are working with the vendor to diagnose the problem but we think some contributing factors are: an unexpected restart of the database triggered accidentally by work done on another project; permissions set incorrectly on a log file but not detected until today's restart; and possible misconfiguration of the activity accumulator within the blackboard system.

Nov 01 2004 - The master machine in the argo system will be down for several hours starting at 10:00 AM on Monday, November 1. Argo account holders will not be able to login during the outage. In addition, user of ANSYS on UIC-based PCs will not be able to run the software because argo is the license server. The purpose of the downtime is to upgrade the OS on the master machine.