Today, the 7th of December 2011, around 7pm, there will be a complete network interruption in the whole Department of Physics for about one hour. The central ETH IT Services (“Informatikdienste”) will replace the hardware of the core router to the HPx network zone (includes the HIT building).

Wireless LAN should not be affected, but as the servers will be offline, too, you won't have access to files or mails on the servers, i.e. don't expect to be able to work during the network downtime. The technicians will reconnect the servers first, so access to the servers from the outside of the Department or via WLAN will be restored earlier than 8pm. Workstations and printers will get network access back afterwards.

Sunday Aug 21, 2011 around 2:30-2:40 pm the ETH Hönggerberg campus experienced a power outage. For some buildings (and/or power lines) the interruption was short and led to reboots of the affected computers. The HCI building remains without power as of this writing (4:20 pm). The server room at HIT D 13 seems not to have been affected by the power loss.

Some of our IT services are affected among them one of our DHCP servers and some of our backup servers. We will have to wait until power is restored in HCI to restart the affected services.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update 5:15 pm power is restored in HCI since about 4:30 pm.

This Thursday, the 7th of July 2011, around 7am, there will be a short network interruption in the whole Department of Physics. The central ETH IT Services ("Informatikdienste") will move our network zone to new hardware, necessary for some future services.

Additionally, the WLAN Landing Page of the "public" network will have a maintenance downtime from 7am to 8am.

Please use fatboy.ethz.ch instead until the 17th October 2010 max. The machine has 128 GB of memory and 4 Quadcores (AMD Opteron). You can also use /scratch but please move your data away until 17th October 2010. Please note that you may not use fatboy after this date.

Update Oct 18: the new hardware is installed. Please use plumpy again.

On Friday, September 17, at 22:00,  we will have to extraordinarily reboot our 64-bit Ubuntu workstations in order to deal with a nasty security issue. We're sorry for the short notice but we've been unpleasantly surprised by this just as much as you have. If you're reading this in time, please save all your data and log out if you can. Please note that also the terminal servers plimpy, plompy, plempy and plumpy (yes I know..) are affected. Thank you.

For reasons still unknown our home directory server fulen stopped serving any files via NFS at about 5:20 pm. This stopped most active Linux logins. In order to restore functionality we had to reboot the file server. As of 5:35 pm fulen is again functioning.

Unfortunately, due to the necessary reboot we cannot fully assess the reason for the incident. It follows a history of poor performance that we have been investigating intensly for the last couple of weeks. We are still trying to find the ultimate cause.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

This morning around 03:00 a water ingress in our HIT server room shut down most of our essential infrastructure servers. As soon as power was back around 08:00 we started to bring our services online.
Please let us know if you still experience any problems. We apologize for the inconvenience. I guess water and servers just don't mix very well.

Status 12:14 apart from the BackupPC server everything should be working again.

Because of performance problems on our Homefileserver we need to reboot the server tomorrow Wednesday, 28th of April 2010. This will cause a downtime between 07:00 and approximately 07:30.

This will result in a short service interruption for the home directories!

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, it is best to close all open files on the home directories.

Update, 07:20: the homes are back...

Update, 09:45: various people experience login problems. We're working on it.

Update, Friday 10:00: problems resolved!

Printing currently doesn't work on most Macs. We're still trying to find the source of the problem.

On Thursday, 4th of May 2010, starting at 5pm we will migrate our webmail service to the new mail server. Since there are no version upgrades of the webmail applications Roundcube and Twig, it will be a smooth transition and you shouldn't even notice the migration. The only thing which can happen is that you get logged out of webmail if you use webmail while the DNS entry changes to the new server address.

Update, Thursday morning: As yesterday morning's unexpected outage of the old mail server showed further hardware problems, we rescheduled moving the incoming (SMTP) mail server functionality to the new mail server to fit into today's maintenance window, too.

This will also be done by switching DNS entries, so you should not experience any interruption nor do you need to change any configuration. However this may cause some temporary issues (e.g. delays) since it does involve new software versions as well as new authentication backends.

Update, 22:45: New webmail and incoming mail server seem to work fine, nearly all users already use the new service installation.