Dear All:
Happy Holidays!
As in previous years, we would like to take the opportunity of lighter than
expected usage during the AEA's ASSA meetings (Jan 7-9, 2022) to upgrade and
update Operating Systems, firmware on our computing cluster and upgrade our
firewall.
This time we are splitting our operations over two days as it involves
two major items on the agenda.
--------------------- PART I ----------------------------------
When (Part I): Friday, Jan 7, 2022 6:00pm - 9:00pm EST.
What (Part I): Upgrade OS of file servers that affects all VPN side
servers.
What will be affected(Part I):
All research computing servers on the VPN side age1...age17, agesas1...agesas3, etc,
will hang and stop responding, but jobs are expected(but not certain)
to resume when the fileserver is upgraded and is back up.
What will not be affected (Part I):
No other service is expected to be down and it includes website,
back-office, admin/tools, email, staff computing or network shares.
Research computing servers - nber0..nber9 will also function normally.
--------------------- PART II ----------------------------------
When (Part II): Saturday, Jan 8, 2022 9:00am - 3:00pm EST.
What (Part II):
* Swap in new firewall
* Upgrade to compute server OS
* Enabling connection to default https port for VPN connection. This will
minimize configuration changes for VPN client setup.
What will be affected (Part II):
* Network will be down. Login from both inside and
remotely will be down.
* While the email servers, accounting servers, back-office
servers will remain up, access to them will be down as the
network will be down. Once the new firewall is installed
email, back-office, and accounting servers will resume
working. Any emails sent from email clients may be
queued on the client and will be sent out once the email
server is accessible.
* Back-office and database related functions like, WP submissions,
conference submissions and notifications, admin/tools will all be
down till the firewall is installed.
* Wifi will be down till the new firewall is installed.
* All Research computing servers - nber0...nber9, and age1...age17,
agesas1...agesas3, and other servers -
will be rebooted. This means any running jobs will get
terminated and they would have to be run again.
* VPN will be down as long as the firewall is down.
What will not be affected (Part II):
* Website - www.nber.org will remain up but as mentioned
WP submissions and conference notifications will be down.
Configuration changes to VPN users will be sent separately. The
existing configuration is expected to work as is so immediate change
to your setup is not necessary.
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We will send another email once we have restored all services.
Thank you and we appreciate your support accommodating this inconvenience.
NBER IT Team.
support_at_nber.org or it-staff_at_nber.org
Dan Feenberg: 617-863-0343
Mohan Ramanujan: 617-588-0367
Alex Aminoff: 617-588-0353
Received on Mon Dec 27 2021 - 19:39:30 EST
