Posts Tagged ‘storage’

group-data server maintenance

Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

Scheduled maintenance will be taking place on our group-data.phys.ethz.ch server on Wednesday, June 7, starting at 16:00. The service will be down for approximately 4 hours. We will be replacing some hardware and upgrade the base system.

All group shares will be affected except IPA, IGP and Galaxy.

For emergency cases, you'll have read-only access to the backups as described here.

Hardware maintenance of storage front-end server igp-data.

Monday, November 30th, 2020

 Update 00:30:

All shares coming back online now. My sincerest apologies for the delay. And good night to all.

Update 22:40: We have run into hardware problems with one of the backends. The shares remain offline as we continue to diagnose it. A further update will be posted as soon as possible.

On Wednesday, 02 XII 2020, between 18:00 and 20:00, access to
igp-data shares will be interrupted for scheduled maintenance.
The shares need to be taken entirely offline for a network upgrade.
At the same time we will be adding more space to the underlying SAN.
This affects all shares on the igp-data storage gateway (ggl, pf and gsg).

Thank you for your patience, and kindest regards.

Hardware maintenance of storage front-end servers.

Thursday, July 30th, 2020

Update 23:50: we ran into severe problems and the migration took longer than expected. Everything is back online now. Sorry we're late.


Planned maintenance will be taking place on all shared-storage front-end servers on Thursday, August 6th, starting at 17:00. The service will be down for approximately 2-3 hours. This post will be updated as soon as work is completed, were we to finish earlier than expected. We will be upgrading the network switch and replacing hardware in several machines.

All group shares will be affected, i.e. group-data, IPA, IGP and Galaxy. Only the home and backup servers will be accessible during this time.

For emergency cases, there will be read-only access to last night’s backup as described here.

Group-data server hardware maintenance.

Tuesday, June 16th, 2020

Update 18:15 group-data is back!

Planned maintenance will be taking place on our group-data.phys.ethz.ch server on Friday, June 19, starting at 17:00. The service will be down for approximately 2 hours. We will be replacing the network interface card to improve service stability.

All group shares will be affected except IPA, IGP and Galaxy.

For emergency cases, there will be read-only access to last night’s backup as described here.

Storage migration

Monday, December 3rd, 2018

Update 21:00 - IGP shares are back. Welcome to igp-data!
Update 19:30 - the D-PHYS shares are back. IGP will take a little more time.

In order to guarantee sustained performance and availability of our storage system, we need to schedule a few storage maintenance windows. The first one will take place on Wednesday, 12.12.2018 at 16:00 and affect all D-PHYS and IGP group shares, but not IPA or galaxy (technically: windata/macdata, but not astrogate or ipa-data). The relevant shares will be offline for at least 3 hours.

For emergency cases, there will be read-only access to last night's backup as described here.

Please note that these migrations will bring some overall changes to the D-PHYS storage setup:

  • the SMBv1 protocol will be disabled on all file servers. It has a long history of security issues and we've migrated all clients to newer versions, so this should not affect anyone. However, there's a small chance that we didn't catch all connections, so please contact us if you experience any issues after the migration.
  • all SMB protocol versions will be restricted to ETH-internal access. This step has been long overdue and since most ISPs block the necessary ports anyway, it shouldn't affect too many users. What it means however: in the future, file server access from outside ETH requires VPN.
  • IGP/D-BAUG will get their own front-end server igp-data. If you're with IGP and have already switched your file server mounts from windata to igp-data, you're good and don't have to do anything. If you haven't, you should do so before Dec 12 in order to get a seamless migration experience.

We'll update this post as the migration progresses and as soon as the systems are back.

Group drive usage reports

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Most of you use at least one of our group drives. Up to now, there wasn't much control over the disk space usage of those group drives, apart from a global quota for each share. We have now developed a monthly report than can be sent to a designated administrator of a share and that nicely states total disk usage, the biggest directories and a member list. It also contains a link to an interactive usage chart (see example here) that can be used to explore the directory. A demo report can be seen here.
So if you think you'd be a good candidate to receive the monthly report of your share(s) and would like to get a good idea about the share's usage, please contact us.