News - Jul 2007

Jul 30 2007 - Argo will be down on Monday, August 6th starting at 9:30 AM. A new platform for user homes will be deployed. All running jobs will be terminated prior to the install. Minimum downtime: 8 hours.

Jul 27 2007 - WHAT IS HAPPENING
On SUNDAY July 29, from 6:00AM NOON, AITS plans to upgrade from BXS 5.25 to BXS 5.3.

Your departments UI-Integrate/Banner users will see limited changes as a result of this upgrade; it will be practically transparent to them. Only the Xtender toolset is changing.

ACTION REQUIRED
This upgrade requires YOUR ASSISTANCE with the mass rollout of a viewer (ActiveX IRC / OCX) to all workstations whose users need to view document images such as purchase orders, student financial aid, human resources, or payroll information. Installation of the viewer must be performed by an individual who has Administrator (ADMIN) access to the user workstations. You may proceed with this activity at any time after receipt of this message. To ensure workstation continuity, the installation of the viewer should be completed BEFORE THE START OF THE JULY 30 WORK DAY.

TO ASSIST YOU
To streamline the install process AITS is providing an MSI which will save you the effort of visiting each workstation individually to install the viewer. To access and download this MSI, go to: https://dev.apps.uillinois.edu/banner/bxs.html. Updated information about Xtender is also available at this web link.

- AITS

Jul 27 2007 - The Blackboard Learning Management and Content Systems (inc. WebDisks) are down for unscheduled service maintenance so that we can apply a quick upgrade and service pack. The system will be back in production in three hours, i.e. by 8pm Friday 7/27. Sorry for the inconvenience. EdG

Jul 26 2007 - Tigger will be rebooted this evening Thursday July 26 at 10:00PM, to install software maintenance. It usually comes back up from a simple reboot like this in less than 30 minutes.

Jul 18 2007 - Due to a software hang involving new userid creation, tigger will be rebooted tonight at 9:00PM. It usually takes less than 30 minutes to come back up from a simple reboot like this.

New account creation is very frequent this time of the year, as we all prepare for the start of the new school year in August. So we've got to make it work right.

While it is down, email destined for tigger will be safely queued until it is back up.

Jul 17 2007 - The scheduled maintenance on the Tigger system from 10PM - Midnight has been completed. Tigger is up and running normally.

Jul 17 2007 - The key server is experiencing a brief outage this morning from approximately 11:05 to 11:20. We apologize for the inconvenience. If problems persist please call the ACCC NOC at: 413-8080 (option 2) or send and email to lan@uic.edu. Thank you.

Jul 16 2007 - Due to a flaky disk controller card, tigger will be down tonight, July 16, from 10:00PM until 12:00Midnight. The exact start of the downtime may be delayed slightly to allow the backup process to complete first. (We don't want to replace something like this controller card unless we have a good recent backup of the disks which it controls.)

While it is down, email destined for tigger will be safely queued until it is back up.

This will not affect the icarus or mailserv servers.

Jul 12 2007 - WE are currently experiencing network problems after turning off an old router that was no longer in use. We are working on resolving the problem now.

Jul 12 2007 - Netowrk came backup at 1:28pm.

Jul 09 2007 - A disk array failed on one of the mailserv backend servers Sunday night after a cache memory failure. We were forced to replace the array and restore mail from a back made early Sunday morning (7/8). This restore completed at around 8am Monday. T he affected server was down for about 12 hours.

Unfortunately, mail that arrived between Sunday morning 2am and about Sunday evening 8pm may have been lost. About 1 of 4 mailserv users may have been subject to this loss and we've posted a list of possibly affected netids. We will also be attempting to scan our delivery logs and we hope later today to be able to provide affected users with a list of the sender addresses and arrival time of the possibly missing messages.

In any case, if you are on the affected list and were expecting an important message Sunday, please notify your correspondent that the message may have been lost.

We regret any problems or inconvenience caused by this outage. We already have plans to begin replacing these older disk arrays this summer and we'll try to accelerate this process