RESOLVED: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Ho...

Melissa Whitt — Tue 6 Aug 2024 19:49 CST

RESOLVED: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Home Directory Storage Upgrade

The issue causing abnormally long login times to EWS Windows computers has been resolved. Computers in the instructional labs environment should pick up the relevant fix by 9PM today.

Please be advised that due to the scheduled maintenance of the EWS home directories, home directories will remain inaccessible.

Notice: Unexpected login issues on FastX related to the EWS Home Directory Stora...

Melissa Whitt — Tue 6 Aug 2024 11:52 CST

Notice: Unexpected login issues on FastX related to the EWS Home Directory Storage Upgrade

WHEN: The desktop client is currently unavailable during the EWS home directory migration until Friday 8/9

WHAT: FastX from the Web client at fast.ews.illinois.edu and the desktop client is currently unavailable.

Notice: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Ho...

Melissa Whitt — Tue 6 Aug 2024 11:50 CST

Notice: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Home Directory Storage Upgrade

WHEN: Since approximately 9am yesterday

WHAT: Logins to Windows computers in Instructional labs have been taking an abnormal amount of time, ranging from 15-30 minutes.

Engineering IT is still investigating a solution to the issue.

Postponed: EWS Home Directories Storage Upgrade will now be August 5-9, 2024 ...

Bobbi Hardy — Wed 24 Jul 2024 11:44 CST

Postponed: EWS Home Directories Storage Upgrade will now be August 5-9, 2024

Who: EWS Students, Instructors, and TA's

When: August 5 through August 9, 2024

What: EWS Home Directories Unavailable for Scheduled Upgrade of Storage

Impact: Files and materials saved in EWS Home Directories will be unavailable August 5th through August 9th. Remote access to EWS Home Directories will also be unavailable during this timeframe.

Action: Students and instructors are encouraged to save all files needed between 8/5 to 8/9 to OneDrive, Box, Google Drive and/or a USB drive prior to August 5th. Please visit https://answers.uillinois.edu/illinois/54880 for details on accessing cloud storage.

Class directories on EWS storage will also be unavailable during this timeframe.

More Information:
Engineering IT is upgrading the storage appliance for EWS Home Directories the week of August 5, 2024. These directories will not be accessible during the upgrade.

Notice: EWS Home Directories Unavailable 7/29-8/2 for Scheduled Maintenance W...

Bobbi Hardy — Wed 10 Jul 2024 12:33 CST

Notice: EWS Home Directories Unavailable 7/29-8/2 for Scheduled Maintenance

Who: EWS Students, Instructors, and TA's

When: July 29 through August 2, 2024

What: EWS Home Directories Unavailable for Scheduled Upgrade of Storage

Impact: Files and materials saved in EWS Home Directories will be unavailable July 29 through August 2, 2024. Remote access to EWS Home Directories will also be unavailable during this timeframe.

Action: Students and instructors are encouraged to save all files needed between 7/29 to 8/2 to OneDrive, Box, Google Drive and/or a USB drive prior to July 29th. Please visit https://answers.uillinois.edu/illinois/54880 for details on accessing cloud storage.

Class directories on EWS storage will also be unavailable during this timeframe.

More Information:
Engineering IT is upgrading the storage appliance for EWS Home Directories the week of July 29, 2024. These directories will not be accessible during the upgrade.

Delays Receiving Emails to ENGRIT-HELP When: Monday, April 29, 2023 at 12:51p...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 30 Apr 2024 16:10 CST

Delays Receiving Emails to ENGRIT-HELP

When: Monday, April 29, 2023 at 12:51pm til 3:45pm on Tuesday, April 30, 2024

What: Emails addressed to engrit-help@illinois.edu were delayed in making it to our ticketing system. We have addressed the reason for the delay and will be working to answer the tickets as they come in.

Thank you for your patience as we work to catch up on the delayed messages. If you have an urgent issue, we encourage you to call our service desks at 217-333-1313.

Resolved: Campus Authentication Issues Impact to Portal Applications Who: Por...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 9 Feb 2024 15:36 CST

Resolved: Campus Authentication Issues Impact to Portal Applications

Who: Portal Users - Grainger College Faculty, Staff, and Grad Students

When: 2:39 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. on February 9, 2024

What: Technology Services posted about issues with their log-in service, Shibboleth Single Sign-On, that also impacted the ability to log-in and use any Grainger College of Engineering Portal applications.

Action: If you continue to experience issues, please email engrit-help@illinois.edu.

NOTICE: CS VM FARM CONSOLE ACCESS AND AUTHENTICATION OUTAGE WHEN: Thursday...

Melissa Whitt — Tue 6 Feb 2024 18:04 CST

NOTICE: CS VM FARM CONSOLE ACCESS AND AUTHENTICATION OUTAGE

WHEN: Thursday, February 8th, 2024, starting at 1:30PM

WHAT: Authentication to vc.cs.illinois.edu and console access from this site to virtual machines hosted on the VM Farm.

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: 3:00pm on Thursday, February 8th, 2024.

DETAILS: There will be an outage on February 8th that will affect console access and authentication on the CS VM Farm. This outage is happening so that necessary updates can be made to the CS VM Farm certificates.
This outage will only affect console access to your VM and logging into vc.cs.illinois.edu, running VMs and SSH access to your VMs will not be affected.
We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause and the short notice.

ALERT: Engineering IT GITLAB OUTAGE When: Sunday, December 3, 2023 What: E...

Bobbi Hardy — Sun 3 Dec 2023 16:57 CST

ALERT: Engineering IT GITLAB OUTAGE

When: Sunday, December 3, 2023

What: Engineering IT GitLab Outage

Audience: Engineering IT GitLab Users

Details:
We have received reports of GITLAB access issues this afternoon. Engineering IT Staff are actively working to identify the problem and a resolution. We will post an updated Status Post once we have more information.

Resolved: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavai...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 19 Oct 2023 12:15 CST

Resolved: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavailable To Save To

Audience: Engineering Administration Staff and Faculty

When: 2:00 p.m. 10/16/ 2023 - 10 a.m. 10/19/2023

We experienced service disruptions in file server that hosts Grainger College of Engineering Administration home and department shared folders. Our team worked diligently to free up space to reach a resolution as soon as possible.

If you experience an error message when trying to save or update a file, please report the problem to engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Update: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavaila...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 17 Oct 2023 11:21 CST

Update: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavailable To Save To

Audience: Engineering Administration Staff and Faculty

When: 2:00 p.m. on October 16, 2023 - current

We are currently experiencing service disruptions in file server that hosts Grainger College of Engineering Administration home and department shared folders. At this time, our team is diligently working to free up space to reach a resolution as soon as possible.

If you experience an error message when trying to save or update a file, we encourage you to temporarily save to your OneDrive folder or to your local downloads folder.

If you need assistance, please send an email to engrit-help@illinois.edu and we will be with you as soon as possible.

Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders Unavailable Audience...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 16 Oct 2023 17:03 CST

Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders Unavailable

Audience: Engineering Administration Staff and Faculty

When: 4:40 p.m. on October 16, 2023

We are currently experiencing service disruptions in file server that hosts Grainger College of Engineering Administration home and department shared folders. At this time, our team is diligently working on a resolution as soon as possible.

If you are in need of assistance, please send an email to engrit-help@illinois.edu and we will be with you as soon as possible.

Notice: Network Issues in Some Units When: 8 am CST, 04/21/2023 What: Duri...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 21 Apr 2023 13:16 CST

Notice: Network Issues in Some Units

When: 8 am CST, 04/21/2023

What: During an IP space clean-up process on April 20th, some IP addresses were inadvertently removed from our network resulting in computers that can not connect to the Illinois wired network.

Audience: Known units impacted are CSL, Engineering Hall, DCL and Hydro lab. Many units and buildings were impacted, but we do not have a complete list.

Action: If you find your computer is not connecting to the network, please email engrit-help@illinois.edu or call at 217-333-1313 with your building name, room number, and jack number, if available, and we will get you back on the network as quickly as possible.

Grad Apps Time Outs and Portal Delays What: Grad Apps in the Engineering Port...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 4 Apr 2023 11:06 CST

Grad Apps Time Outs and Portal Delays

What: Grad Apps in the Engineering Portal is processing a large number of applications and causing some time-outs and delays across the portal.

Timeframe: April 4, 2023, 10am CST until estimated 1pm CST.

Details: We are currently processing a large number of applications in GradApps and it is causing some time outs and delays across the portal. We expect the process to finish before 1PM. If you continue to experience issues after 1PM, please reach out. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.Â

Resolved: Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down What: Some machines in the...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 31 Mar 2023 17:28 CST

Resolved: Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down

What: Some machines in the CSVM Farm were unavailable

When: Morning of March 31, 2023 - until 11:15 am 3/31/2023

Details: The CSVM Farm was experiencing some issues this morning. Virtual machines that are powered off were inaccessible due to a licensing issue. Virtual machines were once again accessible after 11:15 am CST. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Please send any questions about this issue to ews@illinois.edu. Thank you for your patience as we resolved this issue.

Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down What: Some machines in the CSVM Farm...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 31 Mar 2023 10:12 CST

Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down

What: Some machines in the CSVM Farm are unavailable

When:Morning of March 31, 2023 - currently

Details: The CSVM Farm is experiencing some issues this morning. Virtual machines that are powered off are currently inaccessible due to a licensing issue. If your virtual machine was on this morning they should still be accessible over SSH. The relevant departments have been informed and we are working on a fix. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

We will post more information when we have an update or the issue has been resolved. You may send any questions about this issue to ews@illinois.edu. Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.

When: March 15, 2023 What: The Technology Services Office of Privacy and Cy...

Bobbi Hardy — Wed 15 Mar 2023 16:16 CST

When: March 15, 2023

What: The Technology Services Office of Privacy and Cybersecurity alerted campus to a vulnerability in Outlook on Windows machines that is actively being exploited. Microsoft has released patches that we will apply tonight.

Action: Before you leave this evening, we need you to save anything you have open in Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneDrive, Skype for Business, etc.) This does not apply to Mac, iOS, or Android devices.

Our Engineering IT team is working to push Windows Updates to machines overnight tonight which will close all of your Office applications. It is recommended that you perform a reboot on your Windows machine in the morning.

For more information, you can view the notification sent by campus: https://emails.illinois.edu/newsletter/31/116942231.html

If you have questions or concerns regarding your machine, please call our Help Desk, 217-333-1313, or email, engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Resolved EWS FastX Service When: February 24th, 2023, 12:01am to 2pm CST D...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 24 Feb 2023 15:26 CST

Resolved EWS FastX Service

When: February 24th, 2023, 12:01am to 2pm CST

Details: The FastX service was down from the early hours of the morning until 2pm today due to an unplanned event. Service was restored at 2pm and has remained stable.

The issue was due to an automatic update that happened overnight and is currently still being worked on. There may be another short outage tomorrow morning, February 25, 2023, if we are unable to resolve the issue by the end of today.

We will post more information when we have an update or the issue has been resolved. You may send any questions about this issue to ews@illinois.edu. Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service, Websites When: 3pm to 3:20pm ...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 21 Feb 2023 16:20 CST

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service, Websites

When: 3pm to 3:20pm 2/21/2023
What: Engineering Portal and Websites were degraded

Details: Engineering Portal and websites were down briefly. EngrIT staff are looking into the problem and will work to mitigate issues. Please report any further issues to engrit-help@illinois.edu

RESOLVED: Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable What: Mediaspace is currently una...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 23 Jan 2023 16:04 CST

RESOLVED: Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable

What: Mediaspace is currently unavailable

When: January 23, 2023 at 8:28 a.m. til 11:15 a.m., and again from 11:39 a.m. until 3:57 p.m.

Details: Please see Tech Services Status announcements for more information and updates.

Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable What: Mediaspace is currently unavailable ...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 23 Jan 2023 09:23 CST

Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable

What: Mediaspace is currently unavailable

When: January 23, 2023 at 8:28 am til currently

Details: Please see Tech Services Status announcements for more information and updates.

RESOLVED: Grainger College of Engineering Websites Unavailable AUDIENCE: Enti...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 20 Dec 2022 13:41 CST

RESOLVED: Grainger College of Engineering Websites Unavailable

AUDIENCE: Entire College

WHEN: 11:30 a.m. til 12:05 p.m.

WHAT: Grainger College of Engineering websites were unavailable for this period of time. Technicians were able to restore the websites but are still investigating and addressing the root cause.

RESOLVED Engineering Portal Errors - EDW Outage When: Approximately 8:03 a.m....

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 22 Nov 2022 15:37 CST

RESOLVED Engineering Portal Errors - EDW Outage

When: Approximately 8:03 a.m. - End of Day, 11/21/2022

What: Engineering Portal Errors due to AITS EDW Outage

Audience: Engineering Portal Users - using EDW portal applications

Details:
AITS reported problems with the Enterprise Data Warehouse at 8:43am on 11/21/2022. In an updated around noon, they made the decision to take down the warehouse and reload the tables. They anticipate that EDW will not be available for the rest of today, 11/21, but should be available tomorrow morning, 11/22. To see more and follow the EDW status, please see the AITS EDW Post

A status message has been shared on the Engineering Portal site.

UPDATE: Zoom.us Outage Resolved What: Zoom Outage in US When: 1:15pm CST, ...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 3 Nov 2022 13:50 CST

UPDATE: Zoom.us Outage Resolved

What: Zoom Outage in US

When: 1:15pm CST, Thursday, November 3, 2022 through 1:45pm CST

Details:
Tech Services Help Desk has reported multiple reports of Zoom links and calls being unavailable. Zoom.us has confirmed a problem on their end. You can see more about the Zoom.us status post here: https://status.zoom.us/incidents/p01lp74t9427

Zoom.us Outage What: Zoom Outage in US When: 1:15pm CST, Thursday, Novembe...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 3 Nov 2022 13:40 CST

Zoom.us Outage

What: Zoom Outage in US

When: 1:15pm CST, Thursday, November 3, 2022

Details:
Tech Services Help Desk has reported multiple reports of Zoom links and calls being unavailable. Zoom.us has confirmed a problem on their end. You can see more about the Zoom.us status post here: https://status.zoom.us/incidents/p01lp74t9427

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service What: Engineering Portal Degr...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 13 Jun 2022 14:31 CST

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service

What: Engineering Portal Degraded

Timeframe: As of 12:00 p.m. today, 06/13/2022, we have made some adjustments and have noticed improved performance of the Engineering Portal. On Friday, 06/10/2022 at 3:30 p.m., we noticed a slowness with Engineering Portal Applications.

Details: We alerted our developers and technical staff who investigated the issue and made some adjustments.

If you experience further problems, please notify the EngrIT Application Development team at engrit-apps@illinois.edu.

Degraded Engineering Portal Service What: Engineering Portal Degraded Wh...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 10 Jun 2022 17:04 CST

Degraded Engineering Portal Service

What: Engineering Portal Degraded

When: As of 4:00 p.m. today, 6/10/2022, we've noticed a slowness with Engineering Portal Applications.

Details:We have alerted our developers and technical staff who are investigating the issue. We will post an update once we have identified and resolved the problem.

What: Maintenance was performed on gitlab.engr.illinois.edu to perform critical ...

Casey Coughlen — Fri 1 Apr 2022 16:54 CST

What: Maintenance was performed on gitlab.engr.illinois.edu to perform critical security updates.
Services affected: There was a short ~4 minute interruption to gitlab.engr.illinois.edu
Event Date and Type: 2022-04-01 2:09pm â€“ 2:13pm
Estimated time of resolution: 2022-04-01 2:13pm
Root cause: A critical vulnerability was discovered with gitlab-ce.
Details: Select users have had their unused local account passwords reset and they have been notified via email that this change has happened. This will have no impact on the end users' ability to log into the service with their NetID.
Details for this critical vulnerability can be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/03/31/critical-security-release-gitlab-14-9-2-released/#static-passwords-inadvertently-set-during-omniauth-based-registration

Resolved WHAT: EWS home directories and class directories were unavailable to ...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 17 Mar 2022 09:41 CST

*Resolved* WHAT: EWS home directories and class directories were unavailable to clients use Distributed File System (DFS) paths (all of the lab machines and documentation instruct everyone to use DFS paths)

SERVICES AFFECTED: Access to EWS home directories and class directories from Windows and Macintosh clients

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: Morning of March 16, 2022 / unplanned outage

ROOT CAUSE: The DFS server for the EWS environment failed

DETAILS: The failure has been corrected, and services should now be restored.

Resolved as of 12:30pm, per their status page Echo360 is reporting a nationwide...

David Mussulman — Wed 26 Jan 2022 12:51 CST

Resolved as of 12:30pm, per their status page Echo360 is reporting a nationwide degraded performance with capture processing. Classroom recordings are capturing lectures as expected, but there can be a delay in the availability of the recording due to degraded processing.

From the Echo360 Status page: What:Echo360 Capture Processing Degraded Performance Echo360 has identified an issue with capture processing in the US region causing a delay to capture availability. When: 01/26/2022, approximately 08:22 am - 12:30 pm

Echo360 is reporting a nationwide degraded performance with capture processing. ...

David Mussulman — Wed 26 Jan 2022 11:15 CST

Echo360 is reporting a nationwide degraded performance with capture processing. Classroom recordings are capturing lectures as expected, but there can be a delay in the availability of the recording due to degraded processing.

From the Echo360 Status page:

What:Echo360 Capture Processing Degraded Performance

Echo360 has identified an issue with capture processing in the US region causing a delay to capture availability.

When: 01/26/2022, approximately 08:22 am - Currently

RESOLVED as of 12/8/2021 at 9:00am : AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 14 Dec 2021 18:31 CST

RESOLVED as of 12/8/2021 at 9:00am : AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and other AWS dependent Services

Audience: Entire College: Instructors, Researchers

Echo360 logins were impacted by this national AWS outage.

AWS was reporting an outage for US-East-1, that was impacting our college Echo360 service and access to the AWS Console Page. The AWS issue was impacting their services across the US. The AWS issue may have impacted other services.

Workaround for Console: Tech Services posted a way to get through to the Console page: https://status.illinois.edu/SystemStatus/jsp/view_events.jsp?eventId=5556&callFrom=currentEventPage&pageId=CC

AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and other AWS dependent Services Audien...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 7 Dec 2021 12:24 CST

AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and other AWS dependent Services

Audience: Entire College: Instructors, Researchers

Echo360 logins are impacted by this national AWS outage.

AWS is reporting an outage for US-East-1, this is impacting our college Echo360 service and will impact access to the AWS Console Page. The AWS issue is impacting their services across the US. This AWS issue may impact other services.

Workaround for Console: Tech Services posted a way to get through to the Console page: https://status.illinois.edu/SystemStatus/jsp/view_events.jsp?eventId=5556&callFrom=currentEventPage&pageId=CC

Closed: Some CS Virtual Machines not powering on Services affected: student v...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 14 Oct 2021 11:00 CST

Closed: Some CS Virtual Machines not powering on

Services affected: student virtual machines on CS Virtual Farm are unable to be powered on

Event Date and Type: 2021-10-13 ~7:00 p.m. â€“ ongoing / unplanned maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: Thursday, 2021-10-14 11:00 a.m.
Problem has been mitigated, future maintenance work may be done to address the root problem.

Root cause: One of the VMware hosts is exhibiting a disk issue without any logged messages or indications of what has failed
Impacts:The exact number of VMs affected cannot be determined. It appears to mainly affect a subset of CS241 student VMs and some Citrix hosted applications.

Printers in departmental computer labs may be unavailable Who: Printers in depa...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 7 Oct 2021 19:08 CST

Printers in departmental computer labs may be unavailable
Who: Printers in departmental computer labs and instructional spaces

Timeframe: on-going from the start of the semester

Status: In progress

Over the course of the pandemic, printers in computer labs across the college were infrequently used and many are in need of repairs, supplies and replacement parts, or other attention. Engineering IT Instructional Services is experiencing a high volume of requests this semester and it will take several weeks to return the many printers to working condition.

Additionally, the security vulnerability known as PrintNightmare was recently patched by Microsoft, which frequently results in limited or broken printing ability. Even printers in working condition and computers needing to print may require direct attention before full printing capability can be restored. The campus security team has released a statement about PrintNightmare.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

Alternative Solutions: Print to another known working printer, like EWS printers or department administrative printers until the in-lab printer is working For specific issues or concerns, please report them to engrit-help@illinois.edu

RESOLVED What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage i...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 19 Aug 2021 09:23 CST

*RESOLVED* What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage is unreachable.
Services affected: CS VMFarm Instructional VMâ€™s, Github-dev.cs.illinois.edu, Assorted Course Infrastructure machines.
Event Date and Type: 2021-08-17 ~3pm â€“ 2021-08-18 11:30 am / unplanned outage
Estimated time of resolution: TBD, updates will be posted here.
Root cause: A networking change caused an unforeseen outage.
Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra@illinois.edu

What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage is unreachab...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 17 Aug 2021 15:52 CST

What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage is unreachable. Services affected: CS VMFarm Instructional VMâ€™s, Github-dev.cs.illinois.edu, Assorted Course Infrastructure machines. Event Date and Type: 2021-08-17 ~3pm â€“ ongoing / unplanned outage Estimated time of resolution: TBD, updates will be posted here. Root cause: A networking change caused an unforeseen outage. Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra@illinois.edu

Resolved: NFS home directories on Instructional Services Issue Thank you ...

Jordan Lowe — Fri 9 Jul 2021 13:23 CST

**Resolved: NFS home directories on Instructional Services Issue** Thank you for your patience. We have resolved the problem with the NFS home directories and they are once again working. If there are any other questions or comments about this event please email engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Completed: Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance Who: Engineering GitL...

Paul Taraszka — Fri 15 Jan 2021 08:08 CST

**Completed: Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance**

Who: Engineering GitLab users

Timeframe: 12:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Friday, January 15, 2021

Status:

Engineering GitLab (gitlab.engr.illinois.edu) will be unavailable while we perform upgrades to the system hosting the service.

Affected users have been notified starting Tuesday morning via banner messages broadcast to both the GitLab website as well as the git comand line. Please check back for updates on completion of this maintenance.

Update: Maintenance has been completed and GitLab services have been restored as of approximately 8:00 a.m. Please send any issues or questions to engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance Who: Engineering GitLab users Timefra...

Paul Taraszka — Thu 14 Jan 2021 15:44 CST

Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance

Who: Engineering GitLab users

Timeframe: 12:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Friday, January 15, 2021

Status:

Engineering GitLab (gitlab.engr.illinois.edu) will be unavailable while we perform upgrades to the system hosting the service.

Affected users have been notified starting Tuesday morning via banner messages broadcast to both the GitLab website as well as the git comand line. Please check back for updates on completion of this maintenance.

Resolved: Virtual Machine Outage - PPSB Data CenterWho:Impact seems limited ...

Bobbi Hardy — Sat 14 Nov 2020 10:05 CST

**Resolved: Virtual Machine Outage - PPSB Data Center**

Who: Impact seems limited to administrative and research filers

Timeframe: Start 5:00pm, Friday, November 13, 2020 - until 9:30 pm 11/13/2020

Status:

Power issues in the PPBS Data Center during a planned maintenance caused shut down of virtual machines (VMs). The bulk of the affected systems are research and admin filers. The portal and the majority of external facing web services should not be affected.

Our Infrastructure team worked to restore the VMs and ensure that they get restarted successfully to return to normal functionality.

This did impact our standard EngrIT Status Announcement page which prevented our ability to post about this outage.

Updated: New Support Ticket Creations via Email Delayed - FixedAudience: Engin...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 22 Oct 2020 17:04 CST

*Updated: New Support Ticket Creations via Email Delayed - Fixed*

Audience: Engineering IT Customers - Emails to Support

Timeframe: Started 2:05 pm, Thursday, October 22, 2020 - until 4:40 pm 10/22/2020

Status: Incident Resolved. No further updates are scheduled.

Details:
As of 2:30 pm, new emails to Engineering IT have not been creating tickets in our support system. This currently impacts approximately a dozen emails. Our staff is working to identify and address the problem, hoping to fix the problem yet today. Those requests are queued and will be processed once the problem is resolved. Engineering IT Staff will work to address requests as quickly as possible.

Update:
A fix has been implemented, further investigation will take place to ensure long-term resolution to the ticket creation problem.
15 emails were impacted during the outage time frame, but have been processed and directed to the appropriate support teams. Responses to and from previous support tickets were not impacted.

Update: Zoom Outage - ResolvedTimeframe: 8:15 a.m. - 10 a.m Monday, August 2...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 24 Aug 2020 10:59 CST

**Update: Zoom Outage - Resolved**

Timeframe: 8:15 a.m. - 10 a.m Monday, August 24th, 2020

Zoom reports they're rolling out a fix and we've seen improvements with Zoom at Illinois.

Zoom has reported an international outage that affects signing in from our webpages. Zoom links in email and on Compass2G fail.

Alternative Solution: Use the Mobile or Desktop App, sign in using SSO option, and use the Join meeting option. Type in the meeting ID and password to join the meeting.

If the link to the Desktop App fails, you'll need to do a refresh (or hit F5).

You can get updated status from Illinois as the situations develops.

Resolved Multiple virtual machines currently unavailable.Update: Affected VMs ...

Bradley Mahaffey — Thu 18 Jun 2020 08:08 CST

*Resolved* Multiple virtual machines currently unavailable.

Update: Affected VMs should be returning to normal as of 8:00am. A scheduled maintenance will be performed to resolve the cause of the storage issue.

Engineering IT staff are working on resolving a storage system issue that has caused several virtual hosts to become unavailable. Time to resolution is currently unknown.

Resolved Echo360 Outage - National ImpactWho: Instructors and Students with ...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 28 Apr 2020 15:49 CST

**Resolved** Echo360 Outage - National Impact

Who: Instructors and Students with courses that use Echo360 are impacted

When: Tuesday, April 28, 2020 at 2 pm to 3:45 pm

Echo360 Status may be viewed and monitored by visiting https://status.echo360.com/

We are aware of an outage with Echo360 that currently impacts the United States. Echo360 is used by many instructors to record and distribute class lectures.

Please view the Echo360 Status page for updates and specific impacts.

At the time of this notice, Access, Playback, Engagement, Administration, and Reporting services within Echo360 are disrupted

UPDATE: Engineering IT Help Ticketing Service - ResolvedTimeframe: 3 p.m. Fr...

Bobbi Hardy — Sat 4 Apr 2020 10:35 CST

**UPDATE: Engineering IT Help Ticketing Service - Resolved**

Timeframe: 3 p.m. Friday, April 3, 2020 - 10 a.m. Saturday, April 4, 2020

We have heard from our vendor that our ticketing system has been restored and should be stable.

Due to issues with our Help Desk Ticketing service provider, communication through engrit-help@illinois.edu and other support tickets was unavailable.

UPDATE: FastX - Outage - ResolvedTimeframe: 9:00 p.m. Friday, April 3, 2020 ...

Bobbi Hardy — Sat 4 Apr 2020 10:31 CST

**UPDATE: FastX - Outage - Resolved**

Timeframe: 9:00 p.m. Friday, April 3, 2020 - 4:00 a.m. Saturday, April 4, 2020

FastX licenses have been restored and the service should function as expected. Please send any issues or questions to engrit-help@illinois.edu

FastX was unavailable due to a licensing issue. Staff worked with Webstore to restore the service.

NOTICE:Student Home Directories - Storage Limitations, Quota ReachedWho: Stude...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 24 Jan 2020 16:30 CST

*NOTICE: Student Home Directories - Storage Limitations, Quota Reached*

Who: Students using Engineering Home Directories

Start of reports: January 23, 2020

We moved all EWS Student Home Directories to new hardware over the semester break. While that migration was successful, we are investigating recent reports of unexpected storage quotas issues for some students. If impacted, students will see some applications are unable to open and files can not be saved or deleted. We suggest impacted students use other campus-provided storage options, like Box.illinois.edu or OneDrive in Office 365, while we work to resolve the problem.

We hope to have more information about this issue by the end of the day on Monday, January 28th.

Update: Student Home Directories Maintenance CompleteThe Student Home Director...

David Ruby — Fri 10 Jan 2020 16:52 CST

*Update: Student Home Directories Maintenance Complete*

The Student Home Directory Sysem has been moved to new hardware successfully. Access to EWS lab machines and Remote Linux has been restored (1/10/2020).

The new hardware will improve reliability and access speed to student home directories.

Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage Timeframe: Friday, January 10that ...

Bobbi Hardy — Thu 9 Jan 2020 16:25 CST

**Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage**

Timeframe: Friday, January 10th at 4:00am until Tuesday, January 21st at 7:00am.

Engineering IT will perform major maintenance and upgrades to several components of the Citrix service. During this time, Citrix will not be available. The full maintenance window is not expected to be used. Please direct any questions to ews@illinois.edu.

Notice: Student Home Directories Will Be Unavailable During MaintenanceService...

David Ruby — Tue 7 Jan 2020 14:41 CST

*Notice: Student Home Directories Will Be Unavailable During Maintenance*

Services Impacted: All machines that use student home directories, including EWS lab machines and Remote Linux.
Event Start Time/Date: 5pm on Thursday, January 9, 2020
Maintenance Window: 5pm January 9 - 9am January 13

Details:
The Student Home Directory Sysem will be moved to new hardware during the maintenance window of January 9 - January 13.
An update will be posted to Status when the maintenance is completed.

The new hardware will improve reliability and access speed to student home directories.

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity Improveme...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 29 Oct 2019 12:40 CST

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity Improvement

Audience: EWS Instructors, TA's, and Students

Changes have been made to address the intermittent connectivity issues to EWS Windows Student Home Directories. Our current monitoring indicates these changes have improved the connection to Student Home Directories as well as lab login experiences.

Please report any continued issues to ews@illinois.edu.

We will continue to monitor logins and connections. We will update the EWS Instructors, TA's, and Students when we have seen consistent success.

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity IssuesIss...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 25 Oct 2019 16:42 CST

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity Issues

Issues with intermittent connectivity to EWS Windows Student Home Directories began occuring around 4pm on 10/21/2019 and again around 11:30am 10/23/2019.

Impact: EWS Windows users may experience delays or difficulties logging into EWS Windows machines, or connecting to their EWS Windows Student Home Directories.

Engineering IT continues to work with the storage vendor to investigate and test changes. A message was sent to all EWS faculty, instructors, TA's, and students on 10/24/2019 with suggested work arounds during this incident. Please continue to report whole class or lab issues to ews@illinois.edu.

Next Scheduled Status update: Friday, 11/1/2019.

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity IssuesIss...

Bradley Mahaffey — Wed 23 Oct 2019 12:56 CST

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity Issues

Issues with intermittent connectivity to EWS Windows student home directories began occuring around 11:30am 10/23/2019. Engineering IT is continuing to assess the root cause of the issue to bring a resolution as quickly as possible.

** Completed: Planned Maintenance: EWS home directories, Thursday Sept 26, 6:00a...

David Mussulman — Thu 26 Sep 2019 07:59 CST

** Completed: Planned Maintenance: EWS home directories, Thursday Sept 26, 6:00am to 6:30am **

File servers hosting EWS home directories (Linux and Windows) will be rebooted tomorrow for some preventative maintenance. This will entail a 3 to 5 minute interruption in EWS home directories and will occur between 6:00 am and 6:30 am. Full service will be restored by 6:30 am.

Completed: Citrix Maintenance – OutageTimeframe: Wednesday, August 21s...

Bobbi Hardy — Mon 26 Aug 2019 10:10 CST

**Completed: Citrix Maintenance – Outage**

Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21st at 7:00am until Monday, August 26th at 12:00am.

Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21sta...

Bobbi Hardy — Wed 21 Aug 2019 10:20 CST

**Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage**

Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21st at 7:00am until Monday, August 26th at 12:00am.

ALERT: DOCUSIGN Phishing MessageWho: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff, ...

Bobbi Hardy — Wed 31 Jul 2019 10:35 CST

*ALERT*: DOCUSIGN Phishing Message

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff, and Students

What: A phishing email scam is currently targeting members of the University of Illinois with a subject line “DOCUSIGN –University Notice (Illinois State University)”. The message appears to come from “Uwe Rudolph, Dr. med” and has a large yellow button with “VIEW DOCUMENT”.

This phishing attempts to steal your credentials and grants permission to a malicious third-party to your University account.

If you have received the message, please delete it immediately. Do not click on any links found in the email.

If you receive this message and have clicked on the link, your account is compromised. Please immediately contact the Technology Services Help Desk at 217-244-7000 to reset your campus password. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Engineering IT Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

RESOLVED EWS Linux Home Directories UnavailableWho: Engineering Students and...

Mark Hart — Thu 13 Jun 2019 14:07 CST

**RESOLVED** EWS Linux Home Directories Unavailable

Who: Engineering Students and Instructors

What: The file system for Engineering Workstation Systems (EWS) Linux home directories was briefly unavailable from approximately 1:34pm to 1:49pm.

When: 6/13/2019 1:34pm to 1:49pm

RESOLVED Engineering Administrative File System UnavailableWho: Engineering ...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 11 Jun 2019 16:11 CST

**RESOLVED** Engineering Administrative File System Unavailable

Who: Engineering Administrative Staff

What: The server engradmin-file-01.engr.illinois.edu has been restored to stable functioning. Engineering IT teams are still investigating the root cause and will work to prevent future occurrences.

When: 6/11/2019 4:00pm

We are aware of an issue with the server engradmin-file-01.engr.illinois.edu whi...

Bobbi Hardy — Tue 11 Jun 2019 15:41 CST

We are aware of an issue with the server engradmin-file-01.engr.illinois.edu which acts as the electronic file storage location for Engineering Administration staff. It is currently unavailable which means files will not be saved or retrieved from that location.

We are working to identify the source and correct the problem.

Impact:

You will be unlikely be unable to save, retrieve, or use files saved in that location until this issue is resolved.

RESOLVEDcPanel OutageWHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:cPanel...

Laura Hayden — Sun 9 Jun 2019 21:45 CST

**RESOLVED** cPanel Outage

WHO: College of Engineering Faculty and Staff

WHAT: cPanel outage. cPanel is currently experiencing an outage to publicly served websites. WHM and cPanel dashboard are functioning normally. The Technology Services service team is investigating. This outage is affecting departmental and unit sites hosted on the cPanel service.

WHEN: 6/9/2019 at 9:40pm

ALERT cPanel Outage6/9/2019WHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:...

Laura Hayden — Sun 9 Jun 2019 20:32 CST

**ALERT** cPanel Outage 6/9/2019

WHO: College of Engineering Faculty and Staff

WHEN: 6/9/2019 at 6:00pm

Engineering IT Shared Services Help Desks change to Summer Hours and Coverage be...

Bobbi Hardy — Fri 10 May 2019 16:04 CST

Engineering IT Shared Services Help Desks change to Summer Hours and Coverage begins on Monday, May 13, 2019.

Engineering IT Help Desk Summer Hours:
Open: 9am-5pm, M-F
Closed: Over lunch from 12-1pm

The Siebel Help Desk will also be closed over the lunch hour (12-1pm) daily.

Locations:

Due to a shortage of student employee coverage over the summer, there may be times walk-in assistance will be unavailable at a given location.

During these times, when staff are unavailable due to meetings, assisting users away from the desk, or out of the office, there will be signage at that location directing people to seek help via the following methods:

Email: engrit-help@illinois.edu
Phone: 217-333-1313
Walk-in: Other Help Desk Locations

ALERT Ongoing Email Spoofing Attack 4/28/2019Greetings. This message is bein...

Mark Hart — Sun 28 Apr 2019 11:55 CST

**ALERT** Ongoing Email Spoofing Attack 4/28/2019

Greetings. This message is being shared at Dean Bashir's request.

WHO: College of Engineering Faculty and Staff

WHAT: Email Spoofing Attack including messages that appear to come from Dean Rashid Bashir

WHEN: Starting the evening of April 27, 2019, an account using Dean Rashid Bashir's name began sending messages to recipients around campus. The message appeared to come from Dean Bashir's account, but it was actually from 'rbashir@my.com'

We have very few details about this specific attack, but previous spoofing attempts asked if the recipient was on campus. If the user responded, they would receive a reply with links asking them to purchase gift cards on Rashid's behalf. This most recent message requests you reply with your mobile phone number through which you will receive text messages. from the person claiming to be Dean Bashir.

We are actively working with the Office of Privacy and Information Security (OPIS) to attempt to block these messages from delivery, but if you have already received a copy of this message the best course of action is to delete it immediately.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can always reach us by email at engrit-help@illinois.edu or via telephone at (217) 333-1313.

RESOLVED EWS Home directories and EWS Class directories unavailable 26 Apr 2...

David Mussulman — Fri 26 Apr 2019 11:47 CST

**RESOLVED** EWS Home directories and EWS Class directories unavailable 26 Apr 2019 early morning

Who: EWS servers and instructional lab systems

When: Friday, April 26 2019 6:00am – 7:30am

What: Planned maintenance on EWS home and class directory storage servers

EWS home directories and class directories will be temporarily unavailable between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. on Friday, April 26th. This maintenance involves a configuration change to our current EWS storage in preparation for moving to newer, faster EWS storage over the summer.

Systems affected by this outage should be available by 7:30 a.m. on Friday.

If you have questions or concerns about this maintenance, please contact Engineering IT at engrit-help@illinois.edu or (217) 333-1313.

Resolution: The maintenance went a little longer than expected but was resolved by 8:30 a.m. and everything was successful.

RESOLVED: MATLAB opening error, licensing server problemsOn March 4th 2019, from...

David Mussulman — Mon 4 Mar 2019 13:54 CST

RESOLVED: MATLAB opening error, licensing server problems

On March 4th 2019, from the morning hours until ~12:30 p.m. campus users may have noticed problems launching MATLAB with licensing errors. EngrIT contacted WebStore, who restarted and is closely monitoring the licensing server. Users who are still having difficulties starting MATLAB should close and restart the software. If you are still having problems, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu

NOTICE - Unavailabilty of serveral research servers, Physics and MRL home di...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Sat 23 Feb 2019 08:25 CST

**NOTICE** - Unavailabilty of serveral research servers, Physics and MRL home directories, 2/22/2019

On 2/22/2019, from approximately 10:00 p.m. – 10:45 p.m., an issue with a VMware Host in the MRL data center caused several research servers and Physics and MRL home directories to be unavailable. All servers were brought back on-line.

NOTICE - 30 January, 2019 - RESOURCES AND SERVICES TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE D...

Mark Hart — Wed 30 Jan 2019 14:10 CST

**NOTICE** - 30 January, 2019 - RESOURCES AND SERVICES TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO WATER LEAK IN ACB

Who: Engineering faculty, staff, students, and researchers.

When: 30 January, 2019 beginning at 12:30pm

What: Water leak at Advanced Computation Building required systems to be powered off.

Due to a water leak in the data center at Advanced Computation Building (ACB), Engineering IT was asked to power off all systems hosted within ACB. This unexpected disruption had an impact on Engineering students, staff, faculty, and researchers.

In this situation it was critical that we acted quickly to shut down these systems in a controlled way to minimize the chance of long-term negative impact to those services.

Among the services/resources that were impacted are:

CS Instructional Cloud (VM Farm)
Remote EWS Linux service
4CeeD
github.cs.illinois.edu
Various supported research systems

Action required: None - Engineering IT has received notice that we are able restore power to these systems, and we have begun to bring them back online.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this unexpected outage.

If you have any questions or concerns about this disruption, please do not hesitate to contact Engineering IT Shared Services at engrit-help@illinois.edu or at (217) 333-1313.

ResolvedAll affected services should now be back online. Please report any i...

Bradley Mahaffey — Fri 4 Jan 2019 14:28 CST

**Resolved** All affected services should now be back online. Please report any issues to engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Engineering IT is working to address a database issue affecting multiple services. This includes digital signs and the my.portal system. We will update once this has been resolved.

RESOLVED: Engineering IT ticket submission communication system intermittent...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Mon 22 Oct 2018 16:47 CST

**RESOLVED**: Engineering IT ticket submission communication system intermittently down

The issue with Engineering IT ticket submsision communication system has been resolved. If you need IT assistance, you may email engrit-help@illinois.edu or call our Help Desk at 217-333-1313.

Original Post: 9/21/2018 12:37:09 PM
The Engineering IT ticket submission communication system has been intermittently down. This has prevented us from receiving request submissions and replying to submissions. Engineering IT is investigating the cause and working on a solution. We will send an update as soon as the issue is resolved.

If you need IT assistance, please call our Help Desk at 217-333-1313 or visit the closest help desk location.

264 Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL)
9 a.m. - 12 p.m., 1 - 5 p.m., Weekdays

264 Materials Research Laboratory (MRL)
9 a.m. -12 p.m., 1 - 5 p.m., Weekdays

1005 Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (MEL)
9 a.m. - 12 p.m., 1- 5 p.m., Weekdays

2302 Siebel Center
9 a.m. - 5 p.m., Weekdays

If you have submitted a request to engrit-help@illinois.edumore than one day ago and have not received a response, please call our Help Desk at 217-333-1313 to check on the progress of your request.

Notice: Disruption to Engineering FastX Service - Wednesday, October 10, 201...

Mark Hart — Wed 10 Oct 2018 11:35 CST

**Notice**: Disruption to Engineering FastX Service - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - 2:00am to 10:50am

Around 2:00 a.m., Wednesday, October 10, there was a disruption to Engineering's FastX remote connectivity service. This outage was caused by a licensing anomaly. Users attempting to connect to FastX were presented with a message stating that the license server was not running.

Engineering IT became aware of the issue at approximately 10:50am, and by 11:00am the service was restored to full functionality.

Engineering IT is working with WebStore to identify the cause and take steps to prevent it from occurring again in the future.

If you continue to experience any problems with connecting to FastX, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

ALERT: Multiple Phishing ScamsGreetings,Who: Engineering faculty, instructor...

Mark Hart — Mon 20 Aug 2018 11:20 CST

**ALERT**: Multiple Phishing Scams

Greetings,

Who: Engineering faculty, instructors, and staff

What: Multiple phishing scams are currently targeting University of Illinois faculty, instructors, and staff. These phishing scams will attempt to steal your credentials by prompting recipients to click on a link or an attachment that appears legitimate within the message. These messages often appear to come from someone you know or from another legitimate University of Illinois email address.

There are two active phishing scams that we know about in the last couple of days:

1) If you have received a message with a subject line of 'Activate 2-factor authentication' it is most likely fake. While the university is in the process of rolling out 2-factor authentication on an 'opt-in' basis, the message will not come from an individual - it will come from an official office on campus.

2) If you have received a message with a subject line of 'IT Service: Logout Old Section' it is most likely fake. This is a message designed to look official. The message references maintenance on relays.illinois.edu.

Technology Services’ Office of Privacy and Security has begun to take steps block these messages at the campus level, but if you have already received either message and have already clicked on the link or attachment, your account may be compromised. You should change your password immediately. If you have not clicked on the link or attachment, feel free to delete the message(s) from your inbox.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your IT Professional through the Engineering IT Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Notice: Disruption to Some Research Storage and Administrative Applications,...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 21 Jun 2018 09:28 CST

**Notice**: Disruption to Some Research Storage and Administrative Applications, Thursday, June 21, 2018, 12 a.m.

Around 12:00 a.m., Thursday, June 21, there was a disruption to a few research servers and some administrative applications. The list of impacted servers is provided below. By this morning, Engineering IT Infrastructure brought these servers on line, and they are currently investigating the cause. If you continue to experience any problems with your research server or administrative applications, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

mechse-file-01
engr-libna-02
engr-tjha-01
sien-file-01
mrl-jakrogst-01
engr-power-01
madhavan-file-01
mrl-file-02
physics-file-02
selvin-file-01
amtel-file-01
ba-sql-01
engr-prtl-test2

Notice Network Outage in Everitt, Wednesday evening, June 20, 2018Power work...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 21 Jun 2018 08:43 CST

**Notice** Network Outage in Everitt, Wednesday evening, June 20, 2018

Power work performed in Everitt caused a network outage in the building on Wednesday evening, June 20, 2018. The building’s network was restored this morning. If you continue to experience networking problems in Everitt, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

NOTICE Engineering Print Service Migration: Wednesday, May 30 2018Who:Primar...

Mark Hart — Wed 23 May 2018 14:19 CST

**NOTICE** Engineering Print Service Migration: Wednesday, May 30 2018

Who: Primarily Students, and Secondarily Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff

What: On May 30th, Engineering IT will migrate the our print services to PaperCut, the campus-wide print management service.

This migration is taking place in order to align Engineering with the rest of campus in terms of billing for printing on a pay-per-use basis, tracking print jobs, and establishing a common monetary balance that students can use for print services across campus. This effort is aimed at streamlining print services and providing a more consistent printing experience for students across campus.

Web-based Printing will also be migrated to PaperCut, as will existing Engineering students' print balances. Moving forward, printing balances can be replenished through Illini Cash.

Engineering IT’s EWS Printing page has been updated to reflect these changes: https://it.engineering.illinois.edu/ews/ews-printing

We anticipate departmental faculty and staff to experience little to no effect aside from a momentary inability to print as print queues are migrated. This message is being shared with these groups as an FYI.

When: Wednesday, May 30th (individual printers will convert over the course of the day - no time window is available)

Action: There is no action needed on your part. The status of this work will be available here: https://status.engineering.illinois.edu/

While we recognize that this work may cause printing to be temporarily unavailable, this migration is critical to ensure that Engineering IT's systems are up-to-date, robust, and compatible with systems across campus. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Sincerely,

Mark Smylie Hart
Research Technology Facilitator
Engineering IT Shared Services

NOTICE Multiple servers unavailable – Critical maintenance Saturday Ma...

David Mussulman — Tue 15 May 2018 11:43 CST

**NOTICE** Multiple servers unavailable – Critical maintenance Saturday May 19 5am-2pm

Greetings:

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff and Students

When: From 5am to 2pm Saturday May 19, 2018

What: This service outage includes some research and instructional systems, as well as administrative file storage in AERO, CSL, MNTL, MSFE, TEC, MATSE, ESAS, and ISE. The list of systems is below.

Why: On Saturday, 5/19/2018 from 5am to 2pm, Engineering IT will perform critical maintenance on a storage server in Siebel Center. During this period, services from 64 virtual machines used for instruction and research will be unavailable.

Action: There is no action needed on your part. Engineering IT will power down the virtual systems, perform the necessary hardware maintenance, and bring the VM back online afterwards. The status of this work will be available here: https://status.engineering.illinois.edu/

While we recognize that this work can cause some inconvenience, this planned maintenance is critical to ensure that reliability of our VM infrastructure. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Systems affected:

aero-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
cee-garcia.cee.illinois.edu
cee-passaic.cee.illinois.edu
cee-transgroup-01
ict-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
continuum
contuofi -- continuum
cs225-chara.cs.illinois.edu
cs492-server-1.cs.illinois.edu
cs492-server-2.cs.illinois.edu
cwfletch-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
danr-file-02.cs.illinois.edu
dcs-flexlm.cs.uiuc.edu
dcs-network.cs.illinois.edu
dmserv2.cs.illinois.edu
elock-web.cs.illinois.edu
engr-keymaster.cs.illinois.edu
hal9000-sched.cs.illinois.edu
hanj-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
iacoma200-sched.cs.illinois.edu
mir.cs.illinois.edu
monet-washingtn.cs.illinois.edu
seclab-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
torrella-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
csl-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
vlsi-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
engr-metcal.engr.illinois.edu
ehoiscvmwwwg2 Cent OS gallery2
engradm-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
cjshirl2-testing
danr-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
dfms.cen.uiuc.edu
efas2.engr.illinois.edu
eh-ois-cvmdb1 CentOS mysql server Virtual Machine
engr-cpanel2.engr.illinois.edu
engr-gardoni-01.cee.illinois.edu
engr-graphite.engr.illinois.edu
engrit-avtest03
engrit-mms-rdp
engrit-mms-tvm1
engrit-mms-tvm2
engrit-mms-tvm3
engrit-mms-tvm4
engrit-password.ad.uillinois.edu
engrit-storage-admin
engr-jetdirect.ad.uillinois.edu
engr-papercut-1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-papercut-2.engr.illinois.edu
engr-proxy.engr.illinois.edu
engr-rds-01.engr.illinois.edu
engr-rkdixon.engr.illinois.edu
engr-signtest03
engr-sql-d1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-steam.ad.uillinois.edu
lmod-db.engrit.illinois.edu
opencast3-all-01.engrit.illinois.edu
subversion-exam.ews.illinois.edu
esas-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
ise-file-02.engr.illinois.edu
dtrinkle-materialsdb.matse.illinois.edu
mntl-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
msfe-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
tec-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
matse-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

Resolved: Access to Some College of Engineering Departmental Websites Degraded, ...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Wed 18 Apr 2018 18:24 CST

Resolved: Access to Some College of Engineering Departmental Websites Degraded, Wednesday, April 18, 2018

All impacted websites are now back up.

Original Post: 4/18/2018 12:02:16 PM:
Access to several departmental websites are slow or may not be responding. Infrastructure is investigating. This is being caused by increased traffic from a reddit link. To get an update on the statuses of our services, please check https://status.engineering.illinois.edu/.

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maint...

James Babiarz — Sat 17 Mar 2018 10:45 CST

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maintenance.

If for some reason you are still having issues with this host please contactn engrit-help@illinois.edu

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maint...

James Babiarz — Sat 17 Mar 2018 10:45 CST

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maintenance.

If for some reason you are still having issues with this host please contactn engrit-help@illinois.edu

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maint...

James Babiarz — Sat 17 Mar 2018 10:45 CST

This was down from 5:30am to 10:45 am on Saturday 2017-17-03 for scheduled maintenance.

If for some reason you are still having issues with this host please contactn engrit-help@illinois.edu

NOTICE Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned System Maintenance at MRL, Sa...

Mark Hart — Wed 14 Mar 2018 11:47 CST

**NOTICE** Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned System Maintenance at MRL, Saturday, March 17th, 5:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Greetings:

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, and Staff

What: On Saturday, 3/17/2018, from 5:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Engineering IT will perform system updates to our storage infrastructure hosted at MRL. During this period, multiple services and resources will be will be unavailable. These include research storage as well as administrative file shares in CSE, MechSE, MRL, NPL, NPRE, and Physics. As a result, some users' ability to connect remotely may be impacted.

When: From 5:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., Saturday, March 17, 2018

Action: There is no action needed on your part. The status of this work will be available here: https://status.engineering.illinois.edu/

While we recognize that this work can cause some inconvenience, this planned maintenance is critical to ensure that Engineering IT's systems are up-to-date and robust. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

SUBJECT: NOTICE: Campus Network Maintenance - Brief Network Disruptions Acro...

Mark Hart — Wed 10 Jan 2018 10:44 CST

SUBJECT: **NOTICE**: Campus Network Maintenance - Brief Network Disruptions Across Multiple Buildings Saturday and Sunday, 1/13 and 1/14

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, and Staff

What: On Saturday and Sunday the 13th and 14th of January, beginning at 5:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. each day, Technology Services Networking will begin upgrading networking equipment in several buildings across campus. During this window of time, network access to and from multiple buildings will be unavailable for approximately 5 minutes.

When: Saturday, January 13, 5:30a.m.-12:00p.m.

Physics
Kiln House
MEB
MEL
MNTL
MRL
MatSE
North Campus Parking Deck
NCSA
Civil (Newmark)
NPL
NRL
Optical Physics (Gas House)

Sunday, January 14, 5:30a.m.-12:00p.m.

Siebel Center
Aero Lab
SuperCon
Talbot (Aero/NPRE)
Transportation (ISE)

Action: There is no action needed on your part.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. This planned maintenance is critical for Technology Services to ensure that all our networks are up-to-date and robust. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Subject: ALERT: Critical Vulnerability in CPU's and Multiple Operating S...

Mark Hart — Fri 5 Jan 2018 14:31 CST

Subject: **ALERT**: Critical Vulnerability in CPU's and Multiple Operating Systems (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff, and Students

What: As you may have seen in recent news, a critical vulnerability has been identified in computer processors (CPU's) from Intel, AMD, and ARM which can allow an attacker to access your login credentials. A more thorough explanation of this vulnerability can be found here: https://meltdownattack.com/

Action:
What Engineering IT is doing: We will be updating all EWS and Departmental Labs, as well as all systems managed by Engineering IT over the course of the next week prior to the start of the spring semester. Some of these updates may require a system restart. Additional updates may be applied in the future, but those will be communicated separately when their impact becomes more clearly defined.

What can you do: Check for updates manually to ensure your system is fully up to date - including the operating system and all installed applications such as Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. Updates may not be available for every application at the same time, so check regularly and apply the updates as soon as they become available.

While we recognize that these updates can cause some inconvenience, keeping systems updated is critical to ensure that campus systems are as secure as possible. If you have any questions, concerns, or need help checking for updates, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

NOTICE Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned Network and System Maintenanc...

Mark Hart — Wed 3 Jan 2018 15:29 CST

**NOTICE** Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned Network and System Maintenance - Saturday, January 6th, 5:30a.m. - 12:30p.m.

Who: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, and Staff

What: On Saturday, 1/6/2018, from 5:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Technology Services Networking will upgrade networking equipment in Siebel Center. At the same time, Engineering IT will perform system updates to our data storage infrastructure. During this period, multiple services and resources will be will be intermittently and briefly unavailable. These include research storage, web sites, administrative file shares, business and accounting applications, and some portal services.

When: From 5:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Saturday, January 6, 2018

Action: There is no action needed on your part. The status of this work will be available here: https://status.engineering.illinois.edu/

While we recognize that this work can cause some inconvenience, this planned maintenance is critical to ensure that campus systems are up-to-date and robust. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

NOTICE: Engineering IT Closed from Friday, December 22, 2017, through Monday, Ja...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Wed 20 Dec 2017 08:47 CST

NOTICE: Engineering IT Closed from Friday, December 22, 2017, through Monday, January 1, 2018

In accordance with the University's Winter Holiday schedule, Engineering IT will be closed starting from 5:00 p.m., Friday, December 22, 2017, through Monday, January 1, 2018. We will resume our services on Tuesday, January 2, 2018.

Who: Engineering faculty, instructors, students, and staff running Mac OSX High ...

Mark Hart — Wed 29 Nov 2017 12:12 CST

Who: Engineering faculty, instructors, students, and staff running Mac OSX High Sierra

What: on the 28th of November, 2017, a vulnerability was identified in Mac OSX High Sierra (version 10.13.x) which would allow an attacker to gain root access to your system - locally or remotely via Apple Remote Desktop or Screen Sharing - simply by using the account name 'root' and leaving the password blank. This vulnerability exists by default on High Sierra.

To determine if you are running Mac OSX High Sierra, click on the Apple symbol in the upper left corner of your screen and click 'About This Mac'. A popup window will appear and should display your version number. If your Mac OS version number is 10.13.x (High Sierra), your system may be vulnerable.

We strongly recommend you apply the patch Apple has released to address this vulnerability. That update is available through the App Store on the Updates tab, but if you are unable to install that update, the best solution for this is take both of the following two actions:

1) Enable the root account, set a strong password for the root account. Instructions for that process can be found here: http://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-change-the-root-password-in-macos-high-sierra

2) Disable remote access connections to your system via Apple Remote Desktop and Screen Sharing. These settings are in the System Preferences / Sharing panel.
If you have any questions or need assistance with updating your system, please contact your IT Professional through the Engineering IT Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or call (217) 333-1313.

Mark Hart
Research Technology Facilitator

RESOLVED:MRL-FILE-02 corruptionWHAT:The research storage server MRL-FILE-02 has ...

David Ruby — Sun 26 Nov 2017 21:57 CST

RESOLVED: MRL-FILE-02 corruption

WHAT: The research storage server MRL-FILE-02 has a corrupted file (virtual disk) and needs to be restored

SERVICES AFFECTED: Research storage on mrl-file-02, which includes many if not all of the research groups in MRL

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: 2017-11-25 9:30 a.m. – 2017-11-26 9:35 p.m. / degradation and outage for restore

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: Sunday, 2017-11-26 4:30pm, revised to 8:30pm due to the length of time restoral was taking.

ROOT CAUSE: The storage server reported that a file that is the D: drive (data drive) for the virtual server MRL-FILE-02 was corrupt

DETAILS: Although the storage server reported corruption on the file, the Windows server seems to be serving out the data just fine. This means there was probably no noticeable impact by the clients using data on this server. One of the benefits of our storage servers is to be able to detect these types of problems, and so the infrastructure team will take this server offline, restore the file (D: drive) in question, and bring the server back online this afternoon. The file is 3TB allocated, and has just over 1TB used.

9:35pm The vitual disk file for drive D: was succesfully restored to a backup from 12:00am Saturday, November 25th and the server is no longer reporting that file as corrupted.

Resolved: Logins to webhost.engr.illinois.edu are currently unavailableLogins to...

James Babiarz — Tue 14 Nov 2017 11:35 CST

Resolved: Logins to webhost.engr.illinois.edu are currently unavailable

Logins to https://webhost.engr.illinois.edu are working properly now and users can once again edit their website.

_____________________________________________________________________________

WHAT: Users are currently not able to log into webhost.engr.illinois.edu via the web and edit/manage their websites

SERVICES AFFECTED: Editing and management of student and research sites through the web interface

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: 2017-11-14 7:00 a.m. unplanned Outage

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: 2017-11-14 11:20 a.m

ROOT CAUSE: Certificate issues with the webhost have caused issues with logging into the service to manage accounts. Websites are still properly hosted and secured.

DETAILS: Users are unable to access webhost.engr.illinois.edu via the web to edit/manager their websites. This appears to be related to the certificate settings and Infrastructure and web are currently investing the root cause of this problem as well as a solution to it.

All web hosting is still working normally only the editing of sites is current unavailable.

If you are experiencing any other service issues, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or call the Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313.

Logins to webhost.engr.illinois.edu are currently unavailableWHAT: Users are cur...

James Babiarz — Tue 14 Nov 2017 11:12 CST

Logins to webhost.engr.illinois.edu are currently unavailable

WHAT: Users are currently not able to log into webhost.engr.illinois.edu via the web and edit/manage their websites

SERVICES AFFECTED: Editing and management of student and research sites through the web interface

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: 2017-11-14 7:00 a.m. unplanned Outage

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: N/A

ROOT CAUSE: Certificate issues with the webhost have caused issues with logging into the service to manage accounts. Websites are still properly hosted and secured.

All web hosting is still working normally only the editing of sites is current unavailable.

If you are experiencing any other service issues, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or call the Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313.

VPN service has been restored as of approximately 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon.-----...

William Ryan — Sun 29 Oct 2017 19:45 CST

VPN service has been restored as of approximately 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date posted: 10/29/2017 9:52:57 AM

Posted by: William Ryan

Campus VPN Outage 10/29/2017

Off-campus users are currently experiencing login issues with the Cisco VPN service. The problem has been reported to Technology Services.

UPDATE: Kumo is now available in the EWS general use labs (1001 & 1009 MEL, ...

Bradley Mahaffey — Fri 29 Sep 2017 08:44 CST

UPDATE: Kumo is now available in the EWS general use labs (1001 & 1009 MEL, 4th Floor Eng Hall, 4th Floor Grainger, DCL basement). Issues with the software are still being address in other departmental and teaching labs.

Kumo unavailable in EWS Labs

We are aware of an issue with the Kumo software not working in the EWS labs, and are working to rectify the issue with the developer. In the mean time, any cloud services you have mapped from kumo.cites.illinois.edu will not mount in Windows Explorer. Access to these services will need to be done through the service's web interface until a resolution can be found.

RESOLVED: CPanel / Departmental Website OutageSERVICES AFFECTED:Many departmenta...

Mark Hart — Tue 12 Sep 2017 15:24 CST

RESOLVED: CPanel / Departmental Website Outage

SERVICES AFFECTED: Many departmental websites hosted on cpanel.engr.illinois.edu were temporarily unavailable

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: 2017-9-12 12:20 p.m. – 2017-9-12 12:37 p.m. / unplanned degradation and unavailability

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: Tuesday, 2017-9-12 12:37 p.m.

ROOT CAUSE: Memory resource contention issue

DETAILS:
Multiple websites hosted on cpanel.engr.illinois.edu were unreachable for approximately 17 minutes a little after noon today.

Investigations showed that the hardware hosting cpanel.engr.illinois.edu ran out of memory which caused the load average within cpanel.engr to spike which, in turn, created an inability serve hosted websites. Infrastructure staff is working on repairing the system, as well as prioritizing the deployment of new resources to help prevent similar issues in the future.

Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to engrit-help@illinois.edu

Reminder: Required Windows Updates Will be Pushed Out Starting Friday, 9/8/201...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Fri 8 Sep 2017 09:39 CST

*Reminder*: Required Windows Updates Will be Pushed Out Starting Friday, 9/8/2017

Please note that starting today, Friday, 9/8/2017, Engineering IT will push out required updates to any unpatched Windows computers that are on Engineering networks.

Original Post on 8/25/2017, 1:49:33 PM :
Notice: Campus Security Requirement for Windows Computers to be Updated Due to Recent Virus

What: Multiple phishing email scams are targeting the University of Illinois, and one of them is spreading a virus. Campus security is now requiring all Windows computers connected to the network to be fully updated.

On Wednesday, the 23rd of August, Technology Services sent a notice regarding a phishing attack that hit the campus. This phishing attack can exploit a vulnerability in Windows computers that do not have current updates. Campus security will potentially remove any compromised computers from the campus network.

Action Needed From You:
1. Do not click on any suspicious links or attachments without first verifying with the sender. If you receive a suspicious email please forward it as an attachment to report-spam@illinois.edu.
2. Install all available Windows updates for your computers. Microsoft released a patch in March that addresses this vulnerability and Windows Update will install the patch if it is not already on your computer.

What Engineering IT Will Do:
Engineering IT will begin to automatically push out Windows updates beginning on Friday, the 8th of September, to any Windows computers on the Engineering network. If you have any questions or concerns, or need assistance, please contact Engineering Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Notice:Echo360.org outage (resolved).The Engineering lecture capture systems (ec...

Bradley Mahaffey — Tue 29 Aug 2017 10:22 CST

Notice: Echo360.org outage (resolved).

The Engineering lecture capture systems (echo360.org) was inaccessible from approximately 9:30am - 10:15am on 8/29/17. Echo360 engineers were notified and Engineering IT was informed it was a system wide outage affecting all Echo360 customers. The service is restored and accessible again.

RESOLVED: DFS issue 8/22/2017 and ENGRIT-FILE-01 restartSERVICES AFFECTED: Share...

Mark Hart — Tue 22 Aug 2017 10:06 CST

RESOLVED: DFS issue 8/22/2017 and ENGRIT-FILE-01 restart

SERVICES AFFECTED: Shared group directories, redirected folders for all Engineering departments and Engineering IT shares and redirected folders specifically

EVENT DATE AND TYPE: 2017-08-21 11:00 a.m.(?) – 2017-08-22 9:30 a.m. / unplanned degradation and unavailability

ESTIMATED TIME OF RESOLUTION: Tuesday, 2017-08-22 9:30 a.m.

ROOT CAUSE: Unknown at this time

DETAILS:
Yesterday (8/21), there were reports of problems accessing DFS paths to shared folders/desktops throughout various units in Engineering. Investigations showed the problems could not be replicated, so no services were rebooted or restarted. On the morning of 8/22, multiple Engineering IT staff reported issues with redirected desktops and shares. Investigation showed that connections via DFS and directly to engrit-file-01 were not working, so engrit-file-01 was restarted. After that, some people in Engineering IT were working fine, but various units were still experiencing issues (along with some other Engineering IT staff). Testing DFS paths showed engr-dfs-01 was not responding properly, so it was restarted. This seemed to correct the issues. If anyone is still experiencing problems, a log out and login should resolve the issue (or a restart, which might yield better results).

Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to engrit-help@illinois.edu

Resolved: EWS FastX unavailable (license error)Outage: August 1st, hopefully res...

David Mussulman — Tue 1 Aug 2017 11:01 CST

Resolved: EWS FastX unavailable (license error)

Outage: August 1st, hopefully resolved by end of day

The FastX remote graphical interface for EWS Linux (and potentially other Engineering IT Linux servers) is unavailable due to an expired license. We're working on getting an expedited fix.

ssh connections are not affected and a terminal-based fall back until the FastX is restored.

Update 11am: The new license is in place and service should be working as expected. For assistance, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu

Resolved: Several Services Unavailable, Friday, July 28, at approximately 3:20 p...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Fri 28 Jul 2017 20:46 CST

Resolved: Several Services Unavailable, Friday, July 28, at approximately 3:20 p.m.

What: All file services, websites, my.dot portal service, and virtual machines have been brought online.

Origingal Post:
What: On Friday 7/28/2017, beginning at approximately 3:20pm Engineering IT noticed several services have become unavailable. Some file services, some websites, the my.dot portal service, and several virtual machines are impacted.

Engineering IT is actively working on the issue.

If you are experiencing any other service issues, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or call the Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313.

ALERT: Mulitiple Phishing ScamsGreetings,Who: Engineering faculty, instructo...

Mark Hart — Tue 27 Jun 2017 14:25 CST

**ALERT**: Mulitiple Phishing Scams

Greetings,

Who: Engineering faculty, instructors, and staff

What: Multiple phishing scams are currently targeting University of Illinois faculty, instructors, and staff. These phishing scams will attempt to steal your credentials by prompting recipients to click on an attachment that looks like a legitimate link or attachment within the message. These messages often appear to come from someone you know or from another legitimate University of Illinois email address.

There are two active phishing scams that we know about today:

1) If you have received a message today with a fax attachment, it may be malicious. Do not click on the attachment found in the email without first verifying with the sender that they had sent you a fax.

2) If you have received a message describing how to enable new features on an email server with a link to remotely log out from all devices, do not click the link found in the email. It does not point to anything on campus, but instead it will redirect you to greenbus.kz - a known phishing host in Kazakhstan.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your IT Professional through the Engineering IT Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Virus Alert: WannaCry Ransomware Hitting Windows Platform The WannaCry Ranso...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Fri 12 May 2017 21:21 CST

**Virus Alert**: WannaCry Ransomware Hitting Windows Platform

The WannaCry Ransomware, has been spreading across the world today. This ransomware encrypts data files and ask users to pay a US$300 ransom in bitcoins. The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted.

This ransomware takes advantage of a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft released a security patch for in March. Computers that haven’t been updated are at risk. Make sure that your operating system and all software are up-to-date.

Know what 'normal' is like on your computer so if anything goes wrong you'll recognize it sooner. Back up all your critical files. Also, don't click suspicious links or attachments.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Notice:Technology Services Wiki Issues With Class Rosters on 4/29/2017Technology...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Sat 29 Apr 2017 19:36 CST

Notice: Technology Services Wiki Issues With Class Rosters on 4/29/2017

Technology Services Wiki has had issues throughout today with missing class rosters. If you or your students are unable to access your course wiki space, email cites-wiki-mgr@illinois.edu. For a status update, please check Technology Services' Status page.

Update: Echo360 recordings at media.engr.illinois.edu should be accessable for a...

Bradley Mahaffey — Sat 29 Apr 2017 14:15 CST

Update: Echo360 recordings at media.engr.illinois.edu should be accessable for all students again. The issue originated from an access issue with Technology Services at central campus. At this time we have implemented a work around to get Engineering students working again. Other campus instructional resources may be having similar issues.

Original Post:

Date posted: 4/29/2017 1:04:49 PM

Echo360 recordings may be inaccessible to some students for some courses. Engineering IT is working on this issue and will update when more information is available.

Notice: Campus to block SSH (TCP Port 22) Access from Off Campus Starting on Tu...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 13 Apr 2017 13:19 CST

Notice: Campus to block SSH (TCP Port 22) Access from Off Campus Starting on Tuesday, 5/30/2017

Starting from Tuesday, 5/30/2017, Technology Services will block direct SSH access from off campus to on campus systems. SSH access to campus resources will need to go through the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN). This change is critical to meeting NIST recommendations for IT Security.

The VPN provides a secure method for remote access to campus computers and to other resources such as library catalogs, licensing servers, and file servers. The VPN supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices. For the software and the installation instructions, please see Technology Service’s Download and Set Up the VPN Client documentation.

Researchers who have a critical need for direct SSH access are required to complete the SSH Exception form, and once you have submitted your form you will be asked to obtain authorization and assumption of risk from the Dean's Office. Engineering IT can assist you to complete your exception request form, and after you submit your request we can help you obtain the appropriate authorization from the Dean’s Office. Please email engrit-help@illinois.edu and include “SSH Exception” in the subject line. You can also call the Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313 during business hours.

We are currently investigating lock and reboot issues on this server.

Bradley Mahaffey — Wed 12 Apr 2017 11:06 CST

We are currently investigating lock and reboot issues on this server.

Notice: Access to Engineering Home Directories diminished on Wednesday, March 29...

Mark Hart — Wed 29 Mar 2017 14:57 CST

Notice: Access to Engineering Home Directories diminished on Wednesday, March 29, from about 1:10 p.m. – 2:09 p.m.

What: Around 1:15 p.m. this afternoon, an index file for Engineering IT's instance of Distributed File System (DFS) was inadvertently deleted. DFS is used as a method of directing our clients' home directories to a variety of infrastructure storage systems. Without DFS, network shares may not function properly.

As soon as the issue was identified, restoration of the index file was begun and it completed around 2:09 p.m. At this time, access to home directories should be normal.

If you are still experiencing issues with access to your home directory or other network drives, please contact Engineering IT at engrit-help@illinois.edu or call 333-1313.

Notice: EWS color printer on the 4th Floor of Grainger Library will be down for ...

Bradley Mahaffey — Tue 28 Mar 2017 14:31 CST

Notice: EWS color printer on the 4th Floor of Grainger Library will be down for maintenance.

Outage: Thursday March 30, 2017 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm

This is down time is to perform maintenance for the color printer to return it to regular functionality.

Resolved: Citrix Planned Maintenance - Outage beginning Friday, March 17 at 5:00...

Jacob Macgregor — Fri 24 Mar 2017 15:01 CST

Resolved: Citrix Planned Maintenance - Outage beginning Friday, March 17 at 5:00 p.m. and ending Friday March 24 at 8:00 a.m.
This work was successfully completed.

What: Engineering IT has completed upgrades to several components of the Citrix service.
Action needed from you: We strongly recommend updating the Citrix Receiver client to the latest version. Download Citrix Receiver from https://www.citrix.com/products/receiver. Please direct any questions to ews@illinois.edu.

Original Post, 3/19/2017
What: Engineering IT will perform major maintenance and upgrades to several components of the Citrix service. During this time, Citrix will not be available. Please direct any questions to ews@illinois.edu.

Notice: NX10 Update on EWS Windows Workstations - Workstation Restart on 2/22/20...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Tue 21 Feb 2017 17:02 CST

Notice: NX10 Update on EWS Windows Workstations - Workstation Restart on 2/22/2017, from 5:00 a.m. - 7:00 a.m.

What: On Wednesday 2/22/2017, from 5:00 a.m. - 7:00 a.m., Engineering IT will use the regular scheduled maintenance window to restart all EWS Windows workstations to complete an update to NX10. The labs that will be affected are: Engineering Hall, MEL, DCL, and Grainger Library.

If you experience any problems with the workstations outside of this period, please contact ews@illinois.edu or call Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313.

Notice: Phishing Scam Alert: "To: Footman"What: A phishing email scam ...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Wed 15 Feb 2017 16:23 CST

Notice: Phishing Scam Alert: "To: Footman"

What: A phishing email scam is currently targeting mailboxes at the University of Illinois. These phishing emails are targeting campus users indicating that they have requested their mailbox be shut down and includes a link to cancel that request.

Action Needed From You: Technology Services is actively trying to block this message, but in the event that you received a message that matches this description, please delete it immediately. Do not reply to it, and do not click on any links in the email.

If you received this phishing message and have provided your NetID and password, please immediately contact the Technology Services Help Desk at 217-244-7000. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Engineering IT Help Desk at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Notice: Campus Network Maintenance - Brief Network Disruptions Over the Weekends...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Mon 12 Dec 2016 13:43 CST

Notice: Campus Network Maintenance - Brief Network Disruptions Over the Weekends of 1/7/2016-1/8/2017 AND 1/14/2017-1/15/2017

What: On Saturday and Sunday, 1/7/2017 & 1/8/2017 AND 1/14/2017 & 1/15/2017, from 5:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. each day, Technology Services will be upgrading the network switches across campus. During this time, networking will be intermittently and briefly unavailable.

If you experience networking problems outside of these periods, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or call Engineering IT Help Desk at (217) 333-1313.

Notice: Engineering IT Closed from Friday, 12/26/2016, through Monday, 01/02/201...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Mon 12 Dec 2016 13:16 CST

Notice: Engineering IT Closed from Friday, 12/26/2016, through Monday, 01/02/2017

What: Engineering IT will be closed from Friday, 12/26/2016, through Monday, 01/02/2017. We will resume regular business hours on Tuesday, 01/03/2017.

Resolved: Major Building-wide Electrical Work in MRL - Some IT Services Unavaila...

Jacob Macgregor — Tue 22 Nov 2016 12:02 CST

Resolved: Major Building-wide Electrical Work in MRL - Some IT Services Unavailable from 6:00 p.m. (CT) on 11/21/2016 to 5:00 p.m. (CT) on 11/22/2016.

This work was successfully completed.

Original Post, 11/15/2016

From 6:00 p.m. on Monday, 11/21/2016, to 5:00 p.m. (CT) on Tuesday, 11/22/2016, Facilities and Services (F&S) will be conducting major electrical work in MRL. During this time, some IT services and resources will be unavailable. These include research storage and smartphysics websites.

Notice: Electrical Work in Siebel Center - Multiple IT Services Unavailable on 1...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Tue 15 Nov 2016 14:55 CST

Notice: Electrical Work in Siebel Center - Multiple IT Services Unavailable on 11/19/2016, 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (CT)

From 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (CT), Saturday, 11/19/2016, Engineering IT will be working with F&S to replace the data center’s uninterruptable power supply (UPS). This system provides critical protection to the data center during power outages. During this time, many IT services and resources will be unavailable. These include departmental/group file shares; personal S, M, and U drives; Business Administration applications; research storage; and CS e-lock. We expect little impact to the college and departmental websites, course websites, and engineering portal (e.g., my.physics).

Resolved: Windows login and printing from Windows Workstation in EWS labs interm...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Tue 15 Nov 2016 14:47 CST

Resolved: Windows login and printing from Windows Workstation in EWS labs intermittently unavailable on 11/14/2016, from 3:00 p.m.

Issues with Windows login and printing from Windows Workstations in EWS labs was resolved on 11/14/2016, after 4:00 pm.

Original Post, 11/14/2016 3:46:39 PM
Windows login and printing from Windows Workstations in EWS labs have been intermittently unvailable since 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. Engineering IT Infrastructure is working on identifying the cause and resolving these issues.

Notice: Campus to block Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Access from Off ...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Mon 14 Nov 2016 16:29 CST

Notice: Campus to block Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Access from Off Campus on 11/15/2016

Starting from Tuesday, November 15, direct access to on campus systems via Microsoft Remote Desktop will not be possible. To connect to your campus computer, you must use the RDP Gateway or the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN).

The RDP Gateway provides a secure method for remote access to campus Windows computers. To set up the RDP Gateway, please see Technology Service’s Networking, Remote Desktop Gateway Service.

VPN provides a secure method for remote access to campus computers and to other resources such as library catalogs, licensing servers, and file servers. VPN supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices. For the software and the instructions, please see Technology Service’s Download and Set Up the VPN Client documentation.

If you have any questions or need assistance, contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Resolved: The server move was successful, though it took much longer than we est...

David Ruby — Thu 6 Oct 2016 16:38 CST

Resolved: The server move was successful, though it took much longer than we estimated. All services are showing up on the status page properly again.

Original post from 3:34pm 10/6/2016

Engineering IT staff will be moving the Nagios virtual server responsible for monitoring our services to another data center. During the move, which is expected to take 15 minutes, the status page will not be able to update itself and may show services as unavailable or gray colored. The services themselves will still be available during the move of the monitoring server.

Resolved: EWS Linux Systems missing GUI after reboot - 9/22/2016Originally Poste...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 22 Sep 2016 13:44 CST

Resolved: EWS Linux Systems missing GUI after reboot - 9/22/2016

Originally Posted on 9/21/2016, 11:30am
What: EWS lab machines running linux may not have a graphical user interface (GUI) after rebooting. EWS Support is currently working to resolve the issue. In the meantime, please try and avoid rebooting these systems.

Notice: Campus Perimeter Firewall Maintenance - Network Disruption on 10/02/2016...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 22 Sep 2016 11:40 CST

Notice: Campus Perimeter Firewall Maintenance - Network Disruption on 10/02/2016, 3:00 a.m. - 7:00 a.m. (CT)

What: On Sunday, October 02, from 3:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. (CT), Campus Technology Services will be performing significant maintenance on the campus perimeter firewall. During this time, networking into and out of campus will be unavailable.

Access to the following will be disrupted:

Off-campus resources (e.g., websites, cloud services) will be unavailable from campus.
Campus resources (websites, data storage, directories) will be unavailable outside of campus.
Exchange email will be unavailable outside of campus.
Skype for Business/Lync will be unavailable outside of campus
Skype for Business/Lync calls from campus to outside will be unavailable.

The following will not be impacted:

Enhanced 911 (E-9-1-1) calls
Calls within campus (Skype-to-Skype, Lync-to-Lync)
Access to campus websites within campus

More information is provided at Technology Services’ System Status Page. If you have any questions, feel free to contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Resolved: FastX Sessions Unavailable on August 24, 2016 Engineering I...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Fri 26 Aug 2016 13:57 CST

Resolved: FastX Sessions Unavailable on August 24, 2016

Engineering IT discovered that the new client installation of FastX 2.0.15 from the University Webstore is incompatible with Engineering’s new FastX environment. Please use the updated instructions and the alternate download location for the compatible FastX 2.0.60 client at: http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/user-guides/connecting-ews-linux-fastx.

Orginal Post, 8/24/2016:
FastX sessions have been unavailable throughout today. Engineering IT is working on resolving this issue. An update will be posted when the issue is resolved.
If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Resolved: Printing Issues from 8/11/2016 - 8/25/2016 Printing issues related to ...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Fri 26 Aug 2016 13:52 CST

Resolved: Printing Issues from 8/11/2016 - 8/25/2016

Printing issues related to the 8/11/2016 print server upgrade have been resolved. Please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313 if you are continuing to experience problems.

Updated Post, 8/25/26:
Subject: Notice: Printing issues continue in EWS Linux Labs on 8/25/2016
Printing issues resulted from an upgrade to the print servers on 8/11/2016 have been resolved for Windows and Mac platforms. We are receiving reports of sporadic printing issues from Linux platform. If you are experiencing problems with printing, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Updated Post, 8/15/2016:
The printing outage, which resulted from last week's upgrade to the print servers, has continued throughout this morning. If you are experiencing problems with printing, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

Original Post, 8/11/2016:
This morning, Thursday, 8/11/2016, Engineering IT performed a scheduled upgrade to the print servers for the College. No announcement regarding the upgrade was made because earlier tests indicated driver changes would be seamless. Unfortunately, this was not the case for everybody and some of our clients were prompted to install a new print driver.

If you have received the prompt to install a driver, please be assured that it is safe for you to do so. Our IT Pros are actively working to help people with their installations. If you would like assistance, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313.

We apologize for not sending a notice about the upgrade earlier and for any inconvenience that you may have experienced.

Notice: Campus Wiki Outage on 8/15/2016 Normal 0 ...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Mon 15 Aug 2016 11:28 CST

Notice: Campus Wiki Outage on 8/15/2016

What: Campus Technology Services is currently performing an upgrade to Illinois Wiki. Access to existing links may be intermittently unavailable. To check on the progress of this upgrade, please go to: https://status.uillinois.edu/SystemStatus/jsp/current_events.jsp.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Completed: Scheduled Maintenance of Siebel Network and Seibel Data Center UPS on...

Kim Nguyen-Jahiel — Thu 7 Jul 2016 09:45 CST

Completed: Scheduled Maintenance of Siebel Network and Seibel Data Center UPS on 7/7/2016

The scheduled maintenance on Seibel Center’s network and on Siebel Data Center’s Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) has been successfully completed. All impacted services were operational by 7:30 a.m. this morning.

Originally Posted on 6/29/2016 1:52:20 PM
On Thursday, 7/7/2016, from 5:00 a.m. – 7:30 a.m., campus Technology Services will replace the network router in Siebel Center. During this time, the network into and out of Siebel Center will be unavailable.

Engineering IT Infrastructure is taking advantage of this network down time to proactively perform maintenance on the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) in Siebel’s Data Center. Multiple services and applications will be unavailable. These include:

CPanel services for web sites
Engr-linux
Research servers
CS Elock server

If you experience any problems with Siebel networking or any of the above services after this period, please contact at engrit-help@illinois.edu.

Campus Wireless: Intermittent Disruption 6/21/2016, 5:00 am-7:00 amWhat: From 5:...

Mark Hart — Mon 20 Jun 2016 13:43 CST

Campus Wireless: Intermittent Disruption 6/21/2016, 5:00 am-7:00 am

What: From 5:00 am – 7:00 am, Tuesday, 6/21/2018, Technology Services will be performing a routine maintenance on the campus Illinoisnet wireless network. During this time, you may experience brief intermittent disruptions to your Illinoisnet wireless connection. If you continue to experience disruptions after this period, please contact Engineering IT Shared Services at engrit-help@illinois.edu or (217) 333-1313

Notice: EWS Linux login issues - 06/16/2016 - 8:00am to 10:30amThis morning, EWS...

Mark Hart — Thu 16 Jun 2016 10:49 CST

Notice: EWS Linux login issues - 06/16/2016 - 8:00am to 10:30am

This morning, EWS Linux workstations experienced an issue where users were unable to log on to EWS Linux Workstations - either on campus, or remotely.

The issue began around 8:00am and was resolved at approximately 10:30am.

A configuration change has been applied to all EWS Linux Workstations in order to help prevent this issue from happening again in the future.

Affected systems:
All EWS Linux labs
linux.ews.illinois.edu
fastx.ews.illinois.edu

Intermittent availability of Physics department website on Tuesday afternoon was...

Joshua Potts — Tue 14 Jun 2016 19:17 CST

Intermittent availability of Physics department website on Tuesday afternoon was due to temporary unavailability of the xml feed we consume from the campus webtools calendar system. The site has been updated to use shorter timeouts on requests and will skip retrying for 20 minutes if the xml feed is determined to be unavailable. Calendar information will be unavailable during these times but otherwise the site will now continue to function properly.

Intermittent availability of ECE department website on Tuesday afternoon was due...

Joshua Potts — Tue 14 Jun 2016 19:17 CST

Intermittent availability of ECE department website on Tuesday afternoon was due to temporary unavailability of the xml feed we consume from the campus webtools calendar system. The site has been updated to use shorter timeouts on requests and will skip retrying for 20 minutes if the xml feed is determined to be unavailable. Calendar information will be unavailable during these times but otherwise the site will now continue to function properly.

Notice: Seitz Materials Research Lab Chilled Water Outage - 06/15/2016 - 6:00am ...

Mark Hart — Fri 10 Jun 2016 14:28 CST

Notice: Seitz Materials Research Lab Chilled Water Outage - 06/15/2016 - 6:00am to 6:00pm

What: Facilities and Services needs to disable the chilled water supply at MRL in order to perform a service. This will affect air conditioning and cooling throughout the building. Provisions are being made to provide temporary cooling solutions to the datacenter in 241, and the CER in room 259.

Why: This outage is required in order to install isolation valves and add taps for the new DOAS chilled water supply system.

F&S expects normal service to be restored by 6:00pm on the 15th of June.

EWS Lab in Grainger 4th Floor Unavailable from 5/16-5/18/2016The EWS Lab in the ...

Joshua Potts — Fri 13 May 2016 10:00 CST

EWS Lab in Grainger 4th Floor Unavailable from 5/16-5/18/2016

The EWS Lab in the 4th floor of Grainger Library will be unavailable from Monday 5/16 to Wednesday 5/18 for maintenance and upgrade. Students needing EWS resources can use the lab in Engineering Hall 406B1 from 9am-5pm during those days.

[Notice] EWS LABS IN DCL UNAVAILABLE FROM 5/6/2016 - 5/13/2016The EWS Linux Lab ...

Joshua Potts — Tue 3 May 2016 16:28 CST

[Notice] EWS LABS IN DCL UNAVAILABLE FROM 5/6/2016 - 5/13/2016

The EWS Linux Lab in DCL L440 & DCL L520 will be temporarily repurposed to expand the Computer Based Testing Facility (CBTF) from Friday 5/6/2016 to Friday 5/13/2016. We're doing this to expand the capacity of the CBTF due to the number of final exams scheduled to use those systems. This is a temporary change, DCL L440 & DCL L520 will go back to being an EWS Lab after finals are over. The other EWS Linux Labs in 57 Grainger and Siebel Basement will remain open for those who need to use a EWS Linux Workstation.

Availability of other EWS systems can be found at the bottom of this page.

If you have any questions or concerns, we'll be monitoring this thread or you can send them directly to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Good luck with finals everyone!!

Notice: QuickTime for Windows RemovalWhat: Starting on Sunday, 4/24/2016, Engine...

Joshua Potts — Fri 22 Apr 2016 11:40 CST

Notice: QuickTime for Windows Removal

What: Starting on Sunday, 4/24/2016, Engineering User Services will remove QuickTime on Windows computers that are supported by Engineering IT.

Why: Apple has stopped supporting QuickTime for Windows and will no longer provide security updates. As a consequence, Windows systems will be vulnerable to malicious attacks and data loss. The removal is being done to protect our supported Windows computers.

If you have any questions, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

RESOLVED: Websites on web.engr.illinois.edu intermittently slow to load on 4.11....

Joshua Potts — Mon 11 Apr 2016 15:37 CST

RESOLVED: Websites on web.engr.illinois.edu intermittently slow to load on 4.11.16

Websites hosted on the cPanel server at web.engr.illinois.edu were intermittently slow to load starting at about 12:45pm and the degraded performance continued until about 2:45pm when the issue was resolved. Engineering IT is working with the cPanel vendor on strategies to help prevent such a performance slow down in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please send questions to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Citrix Maintenance from 3/23/2016 - 3/25/2016Engineering IT will be taking down ...

Joshua Potts — Tue 22 Mar 2016 16:45 CST

Citrix Maintenance from 3/23/2016 - 3/25/2016

Engineering IT will be taking down the Citrix environment for testing and maintenance at 8am on Wednesday, March 23^rd and restoring service on Friday, March 25^th at 10pm. Please direct any questions to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Completed: Major Maintenance of MRL and Siebel Data Centers on 3/19/2016The majo...

Joshua Potts — Fri 11 Mar 2016 16:31 CST

Completed: Major Maintenance of MRL and Siebel Data Centers on 3/19/2016

The major upgrades to servers in the MRL and Siebel Data Centers have been successfully completed and impacted services were operational by 11:20 a.m. this morning.

Originally Posted on 03/11/2016 - 4:31pm
On Saturday, 3/19/2016, from 6:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Engineering IT Infrastructure team will be performing major upgrades to servers in the MRL and Siebel Data Centers. During this period, multiple services and applications will be unavailable. These include research storage and applications, administrative file shares, business and accounting applications, and some instructional services (e.g., byteshelf).

In the event that the maintenance cannot be completed during this time frame, the Infrastructure team will resume the work on Sunday, 3/20/2016, from 6:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

For status updates, please see https://twitter.com/IllinoisEngrIT.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. This planned maintenance is critical for us to ensure that all our systems are up-to-date and robust. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Resolved: EWS Home Directory File Server Briefly Unavailable on 3/2/2016This iss...

Joshua Potts — Wed 2 Mar 2016 15:40 CST

Resolved: EWS Home Directory File Server Briefly Unavailable on 3/2/2016

This issue has been resolved as of 4/11/2016. On 3/25/2016, Engineering IT Infrastructure installed a fix provided by the vendor. The server was closely monitored for two full weeks to ensure that the root cause had been identified and the software solution worked.

Posted on: 03/17/2016 - 12:26pm
From 11:22 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. today, the EWS Home Directory File Server was intermittently unavailable for students to access their EWS home directories. This is symptomatic of the same issues that occured on Thursday, 2/15. Engineering Infrastructure team is closely monitoring this and taking actions to minimize impact. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Originally Posted On: 03/02/2016 - 3:40 p.m.
From 3:10 p.m. to 3:25 p.m. today, the EWS Home Directory File Server was unavailable for students to access their EWS home directories. This downtime was related to procedures that Engineering IT infrastructure followed according to the server vendor to diagnose and troubleshoot the recurring Linux Web Browsing issue that began last Thursday, 2/25.

Update: Unplanned outage - engr-storage7 - VM and EPM datastoreAt approximately ...

Joshua Potts — Tue 1 Mar 2016 14:47 CST

Update: Unplanned outage - engr-storage7 - VM and EPM datastore

At approximately 3:30 p.m., Engineering IT Infrastructure tested that engr-storage7 (VM and EPM) was back on-line and functional. They are continuing to investigate the cause for the server's unresponsiveness. If you continue to experience any problems with your VM listed below, please contact engrit-help-infra [at] illinois [dot] edu.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Original Posted on 3/1/2016 at 2:48 p.m.:
What: engr-storage7 rebooted – VM and EPM datastore
Services affected: All virtual machines on engr-storage7
Event Date and Type: Approximately 2016-03-01 1:30 p.m
Estimated time of resolution: 2016-03-01 1:45 p.m.
Root cause: The Dell server hosting the datastores hard locked and became unresponsive
Details: Ongoing reboot, status update will be provided after VMs are checked

Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra [at] illinois [dot] edu

Affected VMs:
aero-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
cee-passaic.cee.illinois.edu
cee-transgroup-01
comoto.cs.illinois.edu
cope1.cs.illinois.edu
cpanel1.ec.illinois.edu
cs225-chara.cs.illinois.edu
cs492-server-1.cs.illinois.edu
cs492-server-2.cs.illinois.edu
cs492-server-3.cs.illinois.edu
cse-userdir.cse.illinois.edu
csl-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
cts-prtl-dev.engr.illinois.edu
curiosity.cs.illinois.edu
danr-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
danr-file-02.cs.illinois.edu
dcs-db1.cs.illinois.edu
dcs-video2.ad.uiuc.edu
dcs-winstor1.cs.illinois.edu
dfms.cen.uiuc.edu
dmserv1.cs.illinois.edu
dmserv2.cs.illinois.edu
dtrinkle-materialsdb.matse.illinois.edu
ece-stores-4d.ece.illinois.edu
edu-server.cs.illinois.edu
edu-staging.cs.illinois.edu
efas2.engr.illinois.edu
eh-ocee-8vmweb2 Windows 2008 64-bit Web Server for OCEE
eh-ocee-cvmvchef Cent OS misc video manipulator
ehoiscvmwwwg2 Cent OS gallery2
engr-archive.engr.illinois.edu
engr-codescan
engr-courses.test.engr.illinois.edu
engr-cpanel1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-cpanel-mysql.engr.illinois.edu
engr-dfs-02.engr.illinois.edu
engr-exammode.ews.illinois.edu
engr-forge.engr.illinois.edu
engr-fw-test-02.engrit.illinois.edu
engr-gardoni-01.cee.illinois.edu
engr-graphite.engr.illinois.edu
engrit-badges.engr.illinois.edu
engrit-ocs
engrit-storage-admin
engr-keymaster.cs.illinois.edu
engr-metcal.engr.illinois.edu
engr-nagios.engr.illinois.edu
engr-openshift-dev.engrit.illinois.edu
engr-papercut-1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-papercut-2.engr.illinois.edu
engr-prtl-d1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-prtl-t1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-prtl-t2.engr.illinois.edu
engr-rds-01.engr.illinois.edu
engr-rdslic-01.ews.illinois.edu
engr-rkdixon.engr.illinois.edu
engr-sql-d1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-sql-i1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-sql-t2.engr.illinois.edu
engr-webfs-01.engr.illinois.edu
engr-wincc-01
engr-winservdev.engr.illinois.edu
engr-wryan-2k8r2
hal9000-sched.cs.illinois.edu
hanj-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
iacoma200-sched.cs.illinois.edu
ict-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
ise-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
kamin-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
lsst.cs.illinois.edu
mir.cs.illinois.edu
mntl-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
monet-washingtn.cs.illinois.edu
neo-linux.cs.illinois.edu
prairielearn.engr.illinois.edu
prairielearn2.engr.illinois.edu
prairielearn3.engr.illinois.edu
seclab-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
smyong-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
subversion-exam.ews.illinois.edu
tec-file-01.engr.illinois.edu
torrella-file-01.cs.illinois.edu
vlsi-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

Recurrence: One-hour Disruption to Linux Web Browsing on 02/25/2016This afternoo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 25 Feb 2016 14:05 CST

Recurrence: One-hour Disruption to Linux Web Browsing on 02/25/2016

This afternoon, from approximately 1:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m., the issue that caused disruptions to Linux web browsing yesterday occured, again. Currently, the EWS Home Directory File Server is stable and Linux web browsing is available. Engineering IT continues to investigate this problem to find a resolution. A "Resolved" update will be posted once we have a resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Original post, 02/25/2016: This morning, from approximately 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m., the EWS Home Directory File Server experienced an issue that resulted in an one-hour disruption to web browsing on Linux machines in the EWS labs and through remote Linux access. This issue has been resolved. Please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu if you are still experiencing problems.

CEE File Shares and Home Directories Briefly Unavailable on 2/20/2016On Saturday...

Joshua Potts — Fri 19 Feb 2016 10:22 CST

CEE File Shares and Home Directories Briefly Unavailable on 2/20/2016

On Saturday, February 20, 2016, from 7:00 am -7:30 am, Engineering IT Infrastructure will reboot CEE-file-01 for a critical maintenance. During this time, CEE file shares and home directories may briefly become unavailable. If you experience any issues beyond this time or have any questions, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Citrix Maintenance on 1/17/2016In preparation for the start of the semester, Eng...

Joshua Potts — Fri 15 Jan 2016 16:33 CST

Citrix Maintenance on 1/17/2016

In preparation for the start of the semester, Engineering IT will be taking down the Citrix environment for maintenance at 7pm on Sunday, January 17^th and restoring service on Monday, January 18^th at 10am. Please direct any questions to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

COMPLETED: Planned Maintenance - Possible Portal Service Disruption on 1/7/2015T...

Joshua Potts — Tue 5 Jan 2016 15:04 CST

COMPLETED: Planned Maintenance - Possible Portal Service Disruption on 1/7/2015

The reliability test of the portal system has been successfully completed. If you are experiencing issues with the portal system, please contact engrit-apps [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Original post, 01/05/2016: On Thursday, January 7, 2016, from 7:00 am - 8:00 am, Engineering IT will be testing the portal system to ensure its reliability. During this time, portal services may briefly become unavailable. If you continue to experience any issues beyond this time or have questions or concerns, please contact engrit-apps [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Echo360 Service Unavailable Due To Updates 12/28/2015 – 12/29/2015Starting from ...

Joshua Potts — Tue 22 Dec 2015 17:19 CST

Echo360 Service Unavailable Due To Updates 12/28/2015 – 12/29/2015

Starting from 8:00 a.m., Monday, 12/28/2015 to 8:00 a.m., Tuesday, 12/29/2015, Engineering IT will implement a series of updates to the Echo360 server and Echo360 appliances. During this period, archived lecture recordings will not be available for viewing. Departments are being asked to keep their Echo360 appliances “ON” for the updates. If you continue to experience problems after this period, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Intermittent Service Disruptions from Planned Maintenance 12/28/2015 - 12/29/201...

Joshua Potts — Fri 18 Dec 2015 16:18 CST

Intermittent Service Disruptions from Planned Maintenance 12/28/2015 - 12/29/2015

What: Test of Disaster Recovery Procedures 12/28/2015 - 12/29/2015

Who: Students, Faculty, and Staff

Services Affected: Departmental mail lists, departmental email addresses, GitLab beta code repositories, courses.engr.illinois.edu websites, Engineering IT file server, EWS home directories, and vCenter access.

Event Date and Type: 7:00 a.m. 12/28/2015 – 5:00 p.m. 12/29/2015 / Planned Maintenance

Estimated Time of Resolution: 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, 12/29/2015

Details: Starting at 7:00 a.m., Monday, 12/28/2015 until 5:00 p.m., Tuesday, 12/29/2015, Engineering IT will test its disaster recovery procedures on several systems. During this time, intermittent disruptions may occur in the services listed above as we test and improve our service reliability tools.

If you have any questions, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

EWS Lab in DCL L520 Unavailable from 12/14/2015 - 12/18/2015The EWS Linux Lab in...

Joshua Potts — Wed 9 Dec 2015 17:36 CST

EWS Lab in DCL L520 Unavailable from 12/14/2015 - 12/18/2015

The EWS Linux Lab in DCL L520 will be temporarily repurposed to expand the Computer Based Testing Facility (CBTF) from Monday 12/14/2015 to Friday 12/18/2015. We're doing this to expand the capacity of the CBTF due to the number of final exams scheduled to use those systems. This is a temporary change, and DCL L520 will go back to being an EWS Lab after finals are over. The other EWS Linux Labs in DCL L440 and 57 Grainger will remain open for those who need to use a EWS Linux Workstation.

Availability of other EWS systems can be found at the bottom of this page

If you have any questions or concerns, we'll be monitoring this thread or you can send them directly to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu

Good luck with finals everyone!!

Brief Disruption to Web Service on 11/20/2015On Friday, from 5:00 p.m. – 5...

Joshua Potts — Mon 23 Nov 2015 10:28 CST

Brief Disruption to Web Service on 11/20/2015

On Friday, from 5:00 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Web Services were disrupted due to an issue with one of the web sites on the CPanel web server. Between this time, many departmental websites were inaccessible. Engineering IT Infrastructure isolated the problematic website and rebooted the web server. Web services are now back to normal.

[Notice] Office to be Upgraded to 2016 in Windows Instructional LabsThe version ...

Joshua Potts — Fri 20 Nov 2015 17:12 CST

[Notice] Office to be Upgraded to 2016 in Windows Instructional Labs

The version of Office in all EWS and Departmental Instructional Labs will be upgraded from Office 2013 to Office 2016 during the week of November 23rd. The primary reason for this upgrade is to resolve a bug within the Office 2013 install in the labs which causes Word to crash when editing image heavy documents. Please direct any questions to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

[Planned Outage] Engineering Citrix 11/21-11/22/2015Engineering IT will be takin...

Joshua Potts — Fri 20 Nov 2015 17:02 CST

[Planned Outage] Engineering Citrix 11/21-11/22/2015

Engineering IT will be taking down the Citrix environment for maintenance tonight at midnight (11/21) and restoring service at 5pm on Sunday, November 22^nd. Please direct any questions to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Complete: Emergency Maintenance of Partial VM Farm on 11/11/2015Engineering IT&r...

Joshua Potts — Wed 11 Nov 2015 09:38 CST

Complete: Emergency Maintenance of Partial VM Farm on 11/11/2015

Engineering IT’s monitoring system alerted us to errors in two ESX hosts that could potentially result in outages. To prevent an unplanned outage, Engineering IT Infrastructure team powered off several virtual servers and migrated them to another ESX host. The total downtime to these virtual servers was approximately 5 minutes.

The following virtual servers have been successfully migrated at 6:30 a.m. today:

cpanel.engr.illinois.edu

csl-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

dcs-flexlm.cs.uiuc.edu

dcs-webhostg2.cs.illinois.edu

ece-stores-4d.ece.illinois.edu

efas2.engr.illinois.edu

engr-cpanel2.engr.illinois.edu

engr-ews-sql.engr.illinois.edu

engr-linux-siebl1.engr.illinois.edu

engr-metcal.engr.illinois.edu

engr-rds-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-rdslic-01.ews.illinois.edu

engr-santools.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-d1.engr.illinois.edu

engr-web-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-winservdev.engr.illinois.edu

ews-lic-01.engr.illinois.edu

exam.cs.illinois.edu

mir.cs.illinois.edu

stela-dev.cs.illinois.edu

vlsi-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

Brief Disruption to Portal Services and Some Research StorageEarlier this mornin...

Joshua Potts — Thu 1 Oct 2015 09:08 CST

Brief Disruption to Portal Services and Some Research Storage

Earlier this morning, there was a disruption to portal services and a few research servers due to a hardware problem. The list of impacted servers is provided below. By 7:30 a.m., Engineering IT Infrastructure brought these servers on line. If you continue to experience any problems with the portal or your research server, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

cee-transgroup-01
cts-prtl-prod.engr.illinois.edu
dmserv1.cs.illinois.edu
eh-ois-cvmdb1
engr-fw-test-02.engrit.illinois.edu
engr-fw-test-03.engrit.illinois.edu
engr-sql-t1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-videoproc1.engr.illinois.edu
engr-videoproc4.engr.illinois.edu
monet-washingtn.cs.illinois.edu
smyong-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

Notice: Planned Maintenance May Briefly Impact Availability of Online Lecture Vi...

Joshua Potts — Thu 24 Sep 2015 18:12 CST

Notice: Planned Maintenance May Briefly Impact Availability of Online Lecture Videos

What: Potential interruption in Echo360 lecture capture, availability of online lecture videos and live streaming services

Services Affected: Lecture Capture, Lecture Playback at http://recordings.engineering.illinois.edu, and live streaming from the College of Engineering and College of Veterinary Medicine

Event Date and Type: Saturday, 2015-09-26 7:00 a.m. – 7:30 a.m. / Planned Maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: Saturday, 2015-09-26 7:30 a.m.

Root cause: A network port change will be made to the storage arrays providing these services

Details: On Saturday, September 26^th at 7:00 am, Engineering IT and Tech Services Networking group will enable flow control on the network switch for storage arrays used for lecture capture, lecture video playback, and live streaming. Although no interruption in service is anticipated, the potential for interruption exists, which is why this will be done during a maintenance timeframe.

Resolved: Some recorded lectures currently not available onlineSummary: All of y...

Joshua Potts — Wed 23 Sep 2015 11:00 CST

Resolved: Some recorded lectures currently not available online

Summary: All of yesterday's recorded lecture videos are now available. The issue was caused by an intermittent loss of communication between various servers responsible for processing and publishing lecture videos. Minor changes are being made to the servers' configuration to hopefully prevent a future occurence.

When: Early evening, Tuesday 9/22/2015 to 11am, Wednesday 9/23/2015

Update: Some recorded lectures currently not available online Summary: Some of...

Joshua Potts — Wed 23 Sep 2015 09:33 CST

Update: Some recorded lectures currently not available online

Summary: Some of the lecture videos which were unavailable last night have been published and are now viewable. At present recorded videos are taking much longer to process and publish than normal. Engineering IT staff are working with vendor of our lecture capture system to resolve the issue.

When: Early evening, Tuesday 9/22/2015 to Present

Outage: Some recorded lectures currently not available onlineSummary: Approximat...

Joshua Potts — Tue 22 Sep 2015 21:02 CST

Outage: Some recorded lectures currently not available online

Summary: Approximately two dozen recently recorded lectures from various Engineering courses are currently not available online. Engineering IT staff is currently working to resolve the issue.

When: Early evening, Tuesday 9/22/2015

NOTICE: EWS Labs in DCL closed on 9/14 from 5:00pm - 9:30pmSummary: EWS Labs in ...

Joshua Potts — Fri 11 Sep 2015 10:59 CST

NOTICE: EWS Labs in DCL closed on 9/14 from 5:00pm - 9:30pm

Summary: EWS Labs in DCL will be closed on 9/14 from 5:00pm - 9:30pm, due to a planned power outage.

Who: Students and Faculty who use the EWS Labs in DCL.

What: DCL is scheduled for several power outages in the next two weeks. This is part of the main electrical service upgrade project that has been going on for the past year and a half. Specifically, on Monday 9/14 from 5:00-9:30pm, work will be done on several power panels in the basement of DCL. This necessitates a power shutdown to a part of the basement in DCL. EWS labs impacted: L520, L440 and L416.

When: The work is scheduled for Monday 9/14 from 5:00pm, to be completed by 9:30pm.

RESOLVED: Windows EWS Lab Computer Logon ProblemsSummary: Engineering IT staff f...

Joshua Potts — Sat 5 Sep 2015 15:46 CST

RESOLVED: Windows EWS Lab Computer Logon Problems

Summary: Engineering IT staff fixed the root cause for the problems that occurred today, which prevented individuals from logging onto Windows EWS lab computers.

Who: Students within the College of Engineering

What: A bug within the installer for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 rewrote permissions to a core Microsoft directory within Windows EWS lab computers, preventing the creation of new user profiles. This resulted in students being unable to log onto any Windows EWS computer that they haven't previously logged onto before. A group policy object has been pushed out to correct the folder permissions.

When: 10am to 4pm Saturday, September 05, 2015

Update: Citrix 3D applications are now availableUpdate Tuesday, September 1st: R...

Joshua Potts — Tue 25 Aug 2015 11:56 CST

Update: Citrix 3D applications are now available

Update Tuesday, September 1^st:

Remote access to graphically intensive Citrix applications has been restored. Thank you for your patience, and please direct any questions to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What: All graphically intensive Citrix applications including, but not limited to, CAD programs (e.g., Autodesk, Solidworks) and Adobe graphics programs (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator) have been restored.

Who: Citrix users

RESOLVED: Engineering portal sites outage - Friday, July 31An unplanned disrupti...

Joshua Potts — Fri 31 Jul 2015 17:26 CST

RESOLVED: Engineering portal sites outage - Friday, July 31

An unplanned disruption of service caused access to all Engineering portal sites to be inaccessible for approximately 30 minutes. The issue was resolved at 1:45pm, Friday, July 31.

RESOLVED: EWS Citrix service is now availableResolved: EWS' Citrix service i...

Joshua Potts — Tue 28 Jul 2015 14:20 CST

RESOLVED: EWS Citrix service is now available

Resolved: EWS' Citrix service is now available

The upgrade to the Citrix environment has completed and the service has been restored. Thank you for your patience and don’t hesitate to email us at ews [at] illinois [dot] edu if you have any questions.

------

The EWS Citrix service was unavailable from 2:00pm 7/28 – 3:00pm 7/30 for maintenance.

What: EWS Citrix Service was be unavailable

When: 2:00pm 7/28/15 - 3:00pm on 7/30/15

RESOLVED: Windows Log-in Profile and Desktop and Documents Directory Access Issu...

Joshua Potts — Tue 21 Jul 2015 14:08 CST

RESOLVED: Windows Log-in Profile and Desktop and Documents Directory Access Issues

Resolved - 7/27/15 :

Engineering IT has fixed the root cause for the problems that occurred last week with Windows log-in profiles and access to desktop and document directories. If you are continuing to experience problems, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

--------------------

Who: Windows Users

What: Engineering IT has been made aware that people are having issues logging into their computers and accessing files in their My Documents directory. Our Infrastructure team is working with campus Technology Services to resolve the problem.

We will provide you with a status update once the issue has been resolved. For status updates, please see https://twitter.com/IllinoisEngrIT.

When: Tuesday, July 21.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Power issue at SiebelThis morning a power fluxuation knocked out network hardwar...

Joshua Potts — Thu 25 Jun 2015 10:23 CST

Power issue at Siebel

This morning a power fluxuation knocked out network hardware that supports our storage servers and possibly damaged server hardware.

All servers and services were effectively inaccessible until 10:15am. Networking is now back to normal and our servers have been brought back online.

Engineering IT staff is checking on core services, but most appear to be back and functioning at this time.

Web service outage for maintenance 5/30/2015On Saturday, 5/30, from 5:00 a.m. to...

Joshua Potts — Wed 27 May 2015 14:33 CST

Web service outage for maintenance 5/30/2015

On Saturday, 5/30, from 5:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., the Engineering IT Web Team will be performing a major reconfiguration to the web server web.engr.illinois.edu in order to handle the increasing number of websites. During this time, the following websites will be unavailable:

All websites hosted on web.engr.illinois.edu including:
* Any site at web.engr.illinois.edu/~netid
* Any site at sitename.web.engr.illinois.edu
* Any additional site listed here: https://wiki.cites.illinois.edu/wiki/x/6y1wI

If you have any questions or experience any problems after this maintenance period, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

engr-linux rebootedWhat: engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu was rebooted to correct an...

Joshua Potts — Tue 3 Mar 2015 12:11 CST

engr-linux rebooted

What: engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu was rebooted to correct an unrecoverable NFS issue

Services affected: TheLinux workstations mounting software from engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu would become unresponsive.

Event Date and Type: 2015-03-03 11:30 am – 11:45 am / unplanned outage

Estimated time of resolution: 2015-03-03 11:45 am

Root cause: The NFS software share on engr-linux became unresponsive

Details: One of the three linux software shares became unresponsive. This is on engr-linux, which is also the TheLinux master. Attempts to recover had failed, and it was necessary to restart the system.

Update: EWS home directory checkpoints failing to complete Checkpoints are now s...

Joshua Potts — Tue 3 Mar 2015 11:07 CST

Update: EWS home directory checkpoints failing to complete

Checkpoints are now successfully being captured for the EWS home directories. Students and instructors will be able to roll back to previous versions starting again with 03.03.2015 and onward (keeping in mind that only the last 14 checkpoints captured are available including those that went up to 02.19.2015 as previously mentioned [older ones are automatically removed to recover space]).

We are still working with EMC to determine a root cause for the interruption. Please direct any questions or comments on this event to Infrastructure staff at engrit-help-infra [at] illinois [dot] edu .

----------------

What: The primary EMC VNX storage device is unable to create new checkpoints (snapshots) of its filesystems.

Services affected: EWS home directory daily snapshots (home directory access and replications are unaffected)

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-19 - ongoing / unplanned outage

Estimated time of resolution: TDB

Root cause: TBD

Details:

The primary EMC VNX device in 2301 Siebel is failing to complete the checkpoint process for its six EWS home directory filesystems. The first errors were logged this morning, on 2015-03-02, though in reviewing the checkpoints it was found that the last successful checkpoints were captured 2015-02-19. Any changed or deleted files will be unable to be “rolled back” to a version created after that date. Home directories continue to serve out to workstations and filesystem replications continue to complete to the secondary device in MRL. Infrastructure staff has opened a service request with EMC on the checkpointing failures and failure to log checkpoint events. We will update when we have additional information.

Partial VM outage 02/27/2015What: A datastore connection had gone offline on a h...

Joshua Potts — Fri 27 Feb 2015 13:33 CST

Partial VM outage 02/27/2015

What: A datastore connection had gone offline on a host, and several VMs could access their disks.

Services affected: Managed Engineering IT Linux workstations (TheLinux), ENGR subversion repositories, Physics SmartPhys4

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-27 1:00 pm – 1:30pm / unplanned outage

Root cause: An ESXi host had lost communication to one of its datastores.

Details:

Infrastructure staff is investigating the cause of this event which appears to be very similar to the 2/12 outage that made the same datastore unavailable to a different ESXi host. The affected VMs were brought back up on the other hosts in the cluster and should be functioning normally.

VMs affected:

engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu

engr-subversion.engr.illinois.edu

engr-smartphys4.engr.illinois.edu

engr-storage6 maintenance 2015-02-16 What: A data drive on engr-storage6 has fai...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 18:42 CST

engr-storage6 maintenance 2015-02-16

What: A data drive on engr-storage6 has failed and is currently resilvering (rebuilding) onto a spare

Services affected: All virtual machines on engr-storage6 may experience slowness, no- to low-impact expected

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-16 1:30 pm / drive rebuild

Estimated time of resolution: 2015-02-17 1:30 pm.

Root cause: Data drive failed on engr-storage6

Details:

A data drive has failed in one of the mirrors on engr-storage6. The drive has been replaced with a spare drive in the same enclosure and started resilvering. The operation is expected to take up to 24 hours to complete. Resilvering operations are I/O intensive and VM responsiveness may be impacted (low impact). Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra [at] mx [dot] uillinois [dot] edu

VM list on engr-storage6:

Name

ccgl-file-01.bioen.illinois.edu

clgrad-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

czhai-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

daf-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

danr-home-01.cs.illinois.edu

engr-appdata-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-appdev-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-appdev-03.engr.illinois.edu

engr-archive.engr.illinois.edu

engr-backup-02.engr.illinois.edu

engr-dpm-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-emaptest.engr.illinois.edu

engr-gfi-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-hutchs-01.mechse.illinois.edu

engrit-rdstest.engr.illinois.edu

engr-libna-02.engr.illinois.edu

engr-nagioscore-dev.engr.illinois.edu

engr-nagiosxi-dev.engr.illinois.edu

engr-nagiosxi-dev2.engr.illinois.edu

engr-nagiosxi-dev3.engr.illinois.edu

engr-ptaras2-win.engr.illinois.edu

engr-rdslic-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-test-1.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-test-3.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-test-4.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-test-a.engr.illinois.edu

engr-sql-test-X.engr.illinois.edu

engr-tjha-01.engr.illinois.edu

engr-wryan-2012R2

gitlab-beta.engr.illinois.edu

icmt-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

kcchang-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

mrl-file-03.engr.illinois.edu

nek5k-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

npl-file-01.npl.illinois.edu

pilawa-file-01.ece.illinois.edu

ptaras2-dev1.engr.illinois.edu

shj-web-01.engr.illinois.edu

sien-file-01.cee.illinois.edu

sinhas-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

sundaram-srv-01.cs.illinois.edu

veena-file-02.cs.illinois.edu

vlorenz-file-01.physics.illinois.edu

zaher-file-01.cs.illinois.edu

STATUS: RESOLVED -- Partial VMWare outage The problematic ESXi host has been rem...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 11:28 CST

STATUS: RESOLVED -- Partial VMWare outage

The problematic ESXi host has been removed from service until its datastore connection can be repaired. All VMs have been brought back online by approximately 9:20 pm and appear to be functioning correctly. If you learn of any problems or have any questions, please contact engrit-help-infra [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Correction: ETA is not two months in the past. Infrastructure staff will send an update as soon as more information is known.

What: A datastore connection has gone offline on a host, and several VMs cannot access their disks.

Services affected: Managed Engineering IT Linux workstations (TheLinux), Admin file shares on engradm-file-01, subversion, EWS license servers

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-12 7:30 pm – ongoing / unplanned outage

Estimated time of resolution: 2015-02-12 9:20 pm.

Root cause: An ESXi host has lost communication to one of its datastores.

Details:

Infrastructure staff is investigating the problems, and will send an update as soon as more information is known.

VMs affected:

Engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu

Engradm-file-01.engr.illinois.edu

Ews-lic-01.engr.illinois.edu

Ews-lic-02.engr.illinois.edu

Engr-subversion.engr.illinois.edu

STATUS: Complete -- Network switch maintenance in 2301 Siebel 2015-02-12 This wo...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 11:25 CST

STATUS: Complete -- Network switch maintenance in 2301 Siebel 2015-02-12

This work has been completed without incident at 5:25 am. If you learn of any problems or have any questions about this event, please contact engrit-help-infra [at] illinois [dot] edu.

What: A network switch in the 2301 Siebel datacenter is being partially rewired.

Services affected: Networking will be down briefly for services and machines listed below

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-12 5:00 a.m. – 2015-02-12 5:15 a.m. / planned maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: Tuesday, 2015-02-12 5:15 a.m.

Root cause: Expanding 10Gb capacity in the 2301 Siebel datacenter.

Details:

Infrastructure staff will move the network connections of the machines listed below from their current 1Gb modules to adjacent modules on the switch. The goal is to empty out two 1Gb switch modules so that they can be replaced with 10Gb modules. The network downtime per machine should only be a few seconds. Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra [at] mx [dot] uillinois [dot] edu

Services affected:

EWS Windows terminal services

Siebel NetReg

ECE391 class shares

Engineering SQL servers

MechSE research shares on mechse-srv2

Machines affected:

csil-windows-tsa

csil-windows-tsb

dcs-netadmin

engr-ece391.engr.illinois.edu

engr-lini-snap

ENGR-SQL-01

ENGR-SQL-02

mechse-srv2

Brief engr-linux outage 2015-02-09 amWhat: engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu was reb...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 11:23 CST

Brief engr-linux outage 2015-02-09 am

What: engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu was rebooted Monday morning, February 9, 2015

Services affected: Managed Engineering Linux (TheLinux) workstations relying on engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu, including some software shares

Event Date and Type: 2015-02-09 9:34 a.m. – 2015-02-09 9:40 a.m. / unplanned maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: Friday, 2015-02-09 9:40 a.m.

Root cause: Kernel panic / unrecoverable system error

Details:

Engr-linux.engr.illinois.edu experienced a kernel panic this morning during the testing/deployment of new software. The VM was rebooted and the offending software is disabled. All services should be back to normal. Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra [at] mx [dot] uillinois [dot] edu

COMPLETE: Maintenance: VMware ESXi host updates 02-03-2015This work was complete...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 11:20 CST

COMPLETE: Maintenance: VMware ESXi host updates 02-03-2015

This work was completed without issue for our main virtual host cluster.

Due to high usage I will have to delay the updates on our secondary setup in MRL as I am unable to apply the updates without affecting the experience of the virtual machines.

------------

What: Infrastructure will be updating Engineering VMWare ESXi hosts on the production VMware environment.

Services affected: Engineering VMWare ESXi hosts. All virtual machines will be remain online during this process.

Event Date and Type: 02-03-2015 9:30 a.m. – 02-03-2015 5:30 pm / Planned Maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: 02-03-2015 5:30 pm

Root cause: The application of OS updates to the Engineering VMware ESXi hosts.

Details:

Infrastructure will be updating the VMWare ESXi hosts starting Tuesday at 9:30am. During this process all servers and services that rely on our virtual infrastructure will continue to function as they do normally.

During the update process of an ESXi host all of the VMs currently running on that host are redistributed to other hosts in the cluster. That host is then patched, rebooted, tested and re-added to the cluster. The process of migrating virtual machines from one host to another occurs frequently every day and is part of the normally operating VMware service. I will also be applying the applicable firmware updates to these physical host.

If you have any questions or concerns please let us know. If during this window you encounter an issue with a service or server that you feel may be related to our current maintenance do not hesitate to contact us.

COMPLETE: engr-storage5 maintenance 2015-01-30 amThe following maintenance was c...

Joshua Potts — Mon 16 Feb 2015 11:17 CST

COMPLETE: engr-storage5 maintenance 2015-01-30 am

The following maintenance was completed without incident at 7:25 a.m. on Friday, January 30, 2015.

What: A log drive on engr-storage5 has failed and will be replaced on Friday morning, January 30, 2015

Services affected: All virtual machines on engr-storage5 potentially, but no impact is anticipated

Event Date and Type: 2015-01-30 7:00 a.m. – 2015-01-30 7:30 a.m. / unplanned maintenance

Estimated time of resolution: Friday, 2015-01-30 7:30 a.m.

Root cause: failed SSD drive in engr-storage5

Details:

Infrastructure staff will detach the failed SSD drive on engr-storage5 and replace it with a new drive, then re-attach the new drive as a mirrored drive. There should be no impact to the virtual machines on the servers during this operation. Any questions or comments about this event can be directed to infrastructure staff and open a ticket to engrit-help-infra [at] mx [dot] uillinois [dot] edu

engr-storage5 server back upThe head unit to the storage system in the MRL data ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

engr-storage5 server back up

The head unit to the storage system in the MRL data center is now working properly. The data on the drive arrays was not affected by the outage. We will be working with vendors to determine why the server shut down in the first place or why it had trouble restarting later.

Original post: The storage system, engr-storage5, in the MRL data center is down from what initially appears to be hardware problems. Engineering IT staff is on-site and looking into the problems.

Engr-abbamonte, engr-power-01, mrl-file-01, ekstein-file-01, engr-backup-02, engr-libna-01 and other MRL based VM systems will be unavailable until the problem is resolved.

engr-storage5 server back in serviceEarlier this evening, the head unit to the s...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

engr-storage5 server back in service

Earlier this evening, the head unit to the storage system in the MRL data center had hardware problems and shut down. It has been successfully restarted and the VM's are back up.

Issues with Engineering Student Windows Home Directories Netids N-TEngineering S...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Issues with Engineering Student Windows Home Directories Netids N-T

Engineering Students using EWS lab windows machines with netids between N and T are currently experieriencing problems creating files. When attempting to create a file the user recieves an error similar to "Error 0x80070299: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation."

Engineering IT is currently looking into the problem and will provide more information when it is available.

Other window users (netid A-S and N-Z) are not affected by this issue.

All Linux users are also not affected by this issue.

CITES Wiki Service Upgrade - 8/15-8/17CITES Wiki will be unavailable from Friday...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

CITES Wiki Service Upgrade - 8/15-8/17

CITES Wiki will be unavailable from Friday, August 15th at 5.00 PM until Sunday August 17th at 5.00PM for the system upgrade. All CITES Wiki users will not be able to access all CITES Wiki spaces and pages during the upgrade.

Complete - Maintenance: EWS Windows and Linux home directories outage tonight 8/...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Complete - Maintenance: EWS Windows and Linux home directories outage tonight 8/22 midnight-8am

EWS home directory server upgrade has completed successfully. 99% of all user directories were migrated by 8am. The remaining directories were repaired by 11:30am.

Original announcment 8/21: Engineering IT will take the EWS home directory servers offline for maintenance tonight from midnight to 8am Friday, August 22nd. Course websites, subversion, and other non-home-directory storage will be available but any personalized storage or services that use it in the EWS environment (Windows and Linux workstations, Citrix, remlinux, etc.) will be unavailable. No data will be lost in this maintenance, and service will resume no later than 8am on Friday, August 22nd.

This status entry will be updated with more information throughout the event.

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degradedUpdate: Wednesday, October 1...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degraded

Update: Wednesday, October 16, 2013:

Linux lab computers were operating normally until about 4:30 p.m. today. About 4:30 p.m. Engineering IT received reports that Linux lab computers and remote Linux server were experiencing problems. Service was stabilized around 5:00 p.m. but problem resurfaced and continued through the evening. Engineering IT staff have been engaged in monitoring and attempting to resolve the issue.

EWS Lab computers running Linux and the remote linux servers have been experiencing problems with accessing home directories intermittently this evening. The symptoms include hung graphical Linux sessions, hangs on login, intermittent hangs when running graphical applications/login, apps stop working, or don't load, or the system just seems to freeze. Sometimes they recover, most of the time that's short lived and then they hang again. Engineering IT are investigating this problem, and will update this site with more information when available.

RESOLVED: EWS Linux home directory service degradedUpdate: As of 4:45 p.m. the ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: EWS Linux home directory service degraded

Update: As of 4:45 p.m. the problems were resolved. Engineering IT is researching the root cause of the problem. Please report any additional issues with EWS Labs to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:ews [at] illinois [dot] edu">ews [at] illinois [dot] edu

Engineering IT is troubleshooting EWS Linux home directory performance problems as of 1:45pm. EWS Windows is uneffected.

Home Directory Migration CompleteThe instructional computer labs home directory ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration Complete

The instructional computer labs home directory migration work has completed with a total of 7129 directories having been moved to one of four new Windows file servers. Everyone with an account in the Engineering computer labs now has two separate home directories, one for Linux systems and one for Windows systems, and each has its own 3GB quota.

Please check your files immediately to ensure that they appear intact. Any concerns should be reported to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

A few people will be receiving email about issues encountered while migrating their files.
Check http://ews.illinois.edu/performance for information that will soon be posted about:
Files not migrated, either because they are Linux specific or caused issues during the migration.
Documentation on how to transfer files between Linux and Windows home directories.
Documentation on how to access your Windows and Linux home directories.
The ews-restore command may be used on the Linux systems to recover files that users wish to still have on the Linux systems.

All labs are opening as scheduled at 10:00am this morning, Sunday, October 13. The remote access Linux servers were returned to service at 11:00pm last night.

Thanks to everyone for your patience while we have made these necessary changes. We will be spending the next few weeks making sure that the new infrastructure is performing properly and that all files were migrated correctly. After that, work will begin in earnest on the long term solution. Some information about that is included in the video of the October 10 town hall that was held for students.

Home Directory Migration 95% Complete - remote Linux and NX servers online - Lab...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 95% Complete - remote Linux and NX servers online - Labs Will Open 10am Sunday

As of 11:00pm Saturday, home directory migration is 95% complete and remote Linux and NX servers are back online. The last 5% involves a lot of validation work of the new Windows home directories and this will still take some time. The labs will open as scheduled at 10am Sunday.

An email announcement will be sent Sunday morning to all users that will include additional information about the migration and a request for all users to immediately validate their files.

Home Directory Migration 80% CompleteAs of 7pm Saturday, home directory migratio...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 80% Complete

As of 7pm Saturday, home directory migration is 80% complete.

Home Directory Migration 55% CompleteAs of 3pm Saturday, home directory migratio...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 55% Complete

As of 3pm Saturday, home directory migration is 55% complete.

Home Directory Migration 40% CompleteAs of noon Saturday, home directory migrati...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 40% Complete

As of noon Saturday, home directory migration is 40% complete.

Home Directory Migration 25% CompleteAs of 8:00am Saturday, home directory migra...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 25% Complete

As of 8:00am Saturday, home directory migration is 25% complete.

Home Directory Migration 10% CompleteAs of 12:30AM, home directory migration is ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration 10% Complete

As of 12:30AM, home directory migration is 10% complete.

UPDATED: Video Available of October 10, 2013 Engineering IT Town Hall for Stude...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

UPDATED: Video Available of October 10, 2013 Engineering IT Town Hall for Students

Video of the October 10 IT Town Hall for students is now available, in both rich media playback and vodcast playback formats. Additional information about the town hall, including a list of the questions asked, is posted to the October 10, 2013 IT Town Hall page.

Home Directory Migration began at 9:30PMEWS Home Directory Migration began at 9:...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Home Directory Migration began at 9:30PM

EWS Home Directory Migration began at 9:30PM, Friday October 11. Things are going as planned.

IT Town Hall for Students - Thursday, October 10, 6pm, 119 MSEBThere will be an ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

IT Town Hall for Students - Thursday, October 10, 6pm, 119 MSEB

There will be an IT town hall for all Engineering students this evening, Thursday, October 10, at 6pm in 119 MSEB. Pizza will be provided. Chuck Thompson will be facilitating the town hall and members of Engineering IT will be on hand to assist with answering questions.

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degradedThe Linux home directory ser...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degraded

The Linux home directory server began having issues at 1:45pm on Tuesday, October 15 and as of 4:30pm on Friday, October 18, the problems have continued to reoccur. The Windows home directory servers remain unaffected.

A few configuration changes have been made to at least try and partially mitigate the problems. We do not yet know what impact, if any, these changes have made.

We are trying to determine the source of network traffic that is triggering the problem. Anyone currently working on an assignment that involves writing to files is asked to contact ews [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:ews [at] illinois [dot] edu">ews [at] illinois [dot] edu with information about what they are working on.

Details are being finalized regarding other changes that we will be making to address the continuing issues with Linux home directories.

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - October 19, 2013The issues we are currently st...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - October 19, 2013

The issues we are currently struggling with on the Linux home directory server are not the same as earlier. Previously, restarting the server would restore performance for some period of time. In addition, we had learned how to identify signs that the server was building up to an issue and were pre-emptively restarting it to head those issues off.

The current issue differs in two significant ways. First, the server appears to go from ok to unresponsive with no notice. Second, restarting generally does not resolve the issue. When the problems do start, we have identified on the storage area network a flood of attempts to write 0 byte files. We are still working to identify the source of these requests.

In addition to actively working on trying to identify the source of the problematic traffic, we are also working to implement traffic shaping targeted at the problematic NFS traffic. Those changes are being tested and we hope to implement them before the end of this weekend.

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degradedUpdate: The EWS Linux home d...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

CONTINUED: EWS Linux home directory service degraded

Update: The EWS Linux home directories have been experiencing slowdowns since 9:30am. We're investigating.

ECE 391 Work DrivesThe dedicated ECE 391 work directory server experienced load ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

ECE 391 Work Drives

The dedicated ECE 391 work directory server experienced load issues due the Linux OS unpacking associated with MP0. To address this issue, Engineering IT has throttled back the number of allowed simultaneous server connections to 60. This appears to have relieved many of the delays students experienced earlier in the week. ECE 391 students should be aware of this limitation when planning to complete MP0. The issues ECE 391 students experienced are isolated to the ECE 391 course server and had no impact on other EWS services or users.

Resolved: multiple server outagesAt 7:30am, the storage array engr-storage2 took...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Resolved: multiple server outages

At 7:30am, the storage array engr-storage2 took it's hard drives offline because of a faulty SSD. Infrastructure staff replaced the hardware and restarted the storage system, but the outage caused most virtual servers using engr-storage2 to hang. 76 virtual servers were checked, restarted, or repaired and all systems were returned to service at 9:30am.

Engineering servers infrastructure problem 2014-01-03The server infrastructure f...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Engineering servers infrastructure problem 2014-01-03

The server infrastructure for the College of Engineering experienced an interruption in services at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, January 3, 2014. Engineering IT staff resolved the problems at 11:30 a.m., and began the process of restoring interrupted services at that time. As of 1:00 p.m., it is believed that all interrupted services have been returned to normal status. If you encounter problems with Engineering IT services, please address them to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu. Engineering IT apologizes for the interruption and inconveniences caused.

RESOLVED: EWS Linux /class directories degraded. Maintenance at 7:30pm.Access to...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: EWS Linux /class directories degraded. Maintenance at 7:30pm.

Access to the EWS Linux /class directories are slow, causing sessions using that data to hang. That includes direct access to files under the /class hierarchies, as well as any user sessions that source data from those locations (like an individual user's .bashrc that calls CS232 class files). Those users might see their sessions hang or otherwise oddly fail.

The server hosting the /class directories is misbehaving. EWS will take emergency corrective action against the server around 7:30pm tonight, which may include several interruptions of the /class shares before service is repaired.

Please report any additional problems to ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

12/16 7:45pm: The NFS services on the /class server were restarted. Clients are interacting with it normally now. We'll continue to monitor it through the evening to confirm things are resolved.

EWS Linux home directories 3GB quotas enforcedEWS has re-enabled disk quota enfo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux home directories 3GB quotas enforced

EWS has re-enabled disk quota enforcement on the Linux home directories. Users who have exceeded their 3 GB of disk space will not be able to write new files to their home directory until they remove files to get below the quota. This commonly shows up as an ICEauthority error in the graphical Linux login, and the inability to write files in the EWS shell (usually with a quota exceeded error).

http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/user-guides/engineering-workstation-s... has more documentation and tips to correct being over quota.

Three gigabyte home directory quotas were the norm for EWS. In the late October migrations, quota enforcement was suspended as we moved accounts to the new file servers. Quotas were reenabled for everyone on November 26th.

For assistance, please contact the in-lab student consultant or email ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Building Connectivity Issues ResolvedSome Engineering buildings most likely expe...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Building Connectivity Issues Resolved

Some Engineering buildings most likely experienced brief power blips that impacted network connectivity to campus services and the Internet. As of 3PM, all buildings appear to be back online.

RESOLVED: Some EWS Linux home directories incorrectly reporting "quota exceeded"...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: Some EWS Linux home directories incorrectly reporting "quota exceeded"

From 2:50pm to 3:20pm today, EWS Linux users with NetIDs starting with letters a, b, c, d, l, and m may have gotten an error trying to write to their home directories. The error might have looked something like:

[mussulma@linux-v1 ~]$ touch foo
touch: cannot touch `foo': Disk quota exceeded

This happened even if the quota command reported the user well under their 3GB quota.

As a workaround, EWS staff disabled enforcing quotas on that file system and the symptoms went away. Users reported normal home directory access around 3:20pm.

EWS will continue to investigate, and potentially restart the effected file server during early morning maintenance hours.

EWS Linux Home Directory Server Migration - COMPLETED - October 26, 2013The migr...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux Home Directory Server Migration - COMPLETED - October 26, 2013

The migration of Linux home directories to new file servers successfully completed by 8am on Saturday, October 26 as scheduled. The remote access servers were back in service by shortly after 8am and all Linux labs will be open for their normally scheduled hours. Details about the migration and issues of which to be aware:

Linux home directories were only migrated for users with at least 5 minutes of recorded Linux client usage as of October 13. This was necessary in order to complete the migration of active users in time to open the labs as scheduled this morning. Anyone who was not migrated and requires assistance, please email ews [at] illinois [dot] edu. See below for how to access the old home directory contents on your own.
Empty directories were created for users whose directories were not migrated. Anyone missing a home directory, or having any issues with their new home directory. should email ews [at] illinois [dot] edu or talk to one of the student workers on-duty in the labs.
Read-only access to the home directories on the old file server is available through the path /ewshomeold/?/NetID where ? is the first letter of the NetID.
The ews-restore command does not currently work due to its dependencies on the old file server. It will be updated on Monday to work against the old home directories, primarily so that files moved from Linux to Windows during the October 12 home directory migration can still be recovered. Originally the ability to do this was only going to be available through the end of October. We are making the changes necessary to allow this functionality through the end of this semester.
There may be some brief, unannounced outages for the next few days while we adjust some configuration parameters on the new file servers. We will try and only make changes during off-hours but will do so during the day if necessary to ensure good performance of the new servers.
Snapshots are not currently enabled on the new file servers and it will take the CITES TSM service awhile to do an initial backup of the new servers. Please be cautious that no file recovery will likely be possible for at least a week. One of the features of the old file system (ZFS) that actually did work well was snapshots. The new servers are using XFS and we need to test the snapshots feature of it under Linux before enabling it.
We are going to leave in place through the end of the weekend the workstations converted to standalone mode as a partial workaround. They will be converted back to regular mode on Monday.
We are working to verify that all Linux workstations have picked up the configuration changes necessary to mount the new home directories. It is possible that a few did not pick up the changes and will need to be either rebooted or have manual reconfiguration work done to them.
All non-user home directory shares (e.g. /home/class) are still using the old file server. We are continuing to work on migrating this data off to new file servers with priority being given to /home/class. We should be able to switch /home/class over yet this weekend. It will be end of day Monday before all could be migrated.

Additional status updates will continue to be posted throughout the week to http://ews.linux.edu/performance and to http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/.

EWS Linux Home Directory Server Migration - CONFIRMED for late this evening, Oct...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux Home Directory Server Migration - CONFIRMED for late this evening, October 25

All Linux clients (workstations and remote access) will be taken offline from midnight tonight until 8am tomorrow morning (Saturday, October 26). During this time we will complete the migration of user home directories to new NFS file servers. All Linux labs will close at their regular times tonight (9pm for most) and will re-open at 10am tomorrow. The Linux remote access servers will be available again sometime between 8am and 10am tomorrow morning.

We will most likely not be able to get the non-home directories (e.g. class shares) migrated during this outage. We will be closely monitoring the performance of those shares on the old server while we work to migrate them as well. We will also be monitoring the performance of the new servers as there are some parameters that we may need to tweak after we see how they are performing in production. These changes could require some short outages due to reboots to implement the adjustments.

Note that at this time we are only migrating the files of students have who accessed the Linux systems at some point this semester. The home directories for all users from the old server will still be available on the clients but read-only under the path /ewshomeold/X/NetID where X is the first letter of the NetID.

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - Data Migration Beginning - October 24, 2013Pre...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - Data Migration Beginning - October 24, 2013

Preliminary data transfers are beginning this evening to three Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers that have been configured as new NFS servers. We are using rsync to copy the data to the new servers, both to avoid the issues we are having with NFS and to allow us to copy the bulk of the data while the old server remains in service. Despite the performance issues with the current server, some students have been able to get some work done.

Once the initial transfers are complete we are currently intending to take the Linux clients (workstations and remote) completely offline overnight in order to perform a final rsync and to convert the clients over to mounting the new shares. It is possible that this could be as early as Friday evening until Saturday morning but it could slip to a day later. We will have a better estimate after we see what the performance is of this evening's data transfers compared to what we saw during limited testing.

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - Partial Workaround Available - October 23, 201...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux Home Directory Update - Partial Workaround Available - October 23, 2013

Our efforts to find a solution to the problems with the NFS file server have (painfully obviously) not succeeded. We are implementing a partial workaround (pilot instances of which are now available) and new NFS filer servers (i.e. throwing out the old server completely).

Partial Workaround

We have setup a number of Linux workstations in Everitt, Grainger, and Siebel that use a local-to-the-system home directory instead of the troubled network storage. This allows working on the local system while avoiding most of the performance issues caused by the problematic server. A link is provided to the user's networked home directory so that those files can still be accessed.

Once files are copied to the local system (from the networked home directory, via SVN, from a thumb drive, or cloud storage ) it should be possible to do most work without being impacted by the server issues. It is critical that any work done be copied back to another location and not left on the local workstation. Files left on a workstation will not be accessible from any other workstation. In addition, files left may be cleaned out in order to keep the local disk from filling up.

The locations of the modified workstations:

252 Everitt: 4 stations immediately upon entering the lab
57 Grainger: 10 stations along the wall starting from the student consultant station
222 Siebel: all 36 stations

The modified workstations have a different background, with a picture of an island, and a warning notice that "This system uses a local home directory!!". Launching a terminal window will also provide instructions on how to access the networked directory.

This is NOT a permanent solution. It is being provided in an effort to allow students to work while a real solution is implemented.

New NFS File Servers

Three Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers are being configured as new NFS servers. We hope to begin migrating student directories to these new servers potentially as early as Friday and definitely before the end of the weekend. Additional information will be posted before any migrations begin.

ECE 391 work drive unavailableThe dedicated ECE 391 server is experiencing a pro...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

ECE 391 work drive unavailable

The dedicated ECE 391 server is experiencing a problem with its storage array. Engineering IT Infrastructure staff are currently addressing this issue.

UPDATE: As of 12:15AM the ECE 391 server was back online. Root cause analysis is currently underway.

EWS Service Outage - Friday, Oct. 11, 9pm until Sunday, Oct. 13, 10amAll College...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Service Outage - Friday, Oct. 11, 9pm until Sunday, Oct. 13, 10am

All College of Engineering instructional computer lab systems, college-wide and departmental, will be unavailable for use, beginning 9:00pm Friday, October 11 and ending no later than 10:00am Sunday, October 13. This includes all remote access servers. See http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/ews/performance/short-term-solution for additional information.

During the outage, regular status updates will be posted to both http://ews.illinois.edu/performance and http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/ so that users may monitor actual progress.

The website http://ews.illinois.edu/performance will be updated throughout the week with additional details about the outage and the changes being implemented.

EWS home directories experiencing extreme latencyAs of 10PM, EWS home directorie...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories experiencing extreme latency

As of 10PM, EWS home directories began experiencing extreme latency. Staff are immediately addressing this issue.

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.As of 10:30AM, following an e...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.

As of 10:30AM, following an emergency reboot, EWS storage is back to normal performance.

Continued EWS storage problemsAs of 9:40AM, EWS home directories are again exper...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Continued EWS storage problems

As of 9:40AM, EWS home directories are again experiencing problems. We are working on this issue.

Investigating EWS slowdownsAs of Wednesday, Sept 18th we're investigating EWS ho...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Investigating EWS slowdowns

As of Wednesday, Sept 18th we're investigating EWS home directory slow downs in Linux and Windows. These appear to be intermittent and not wide-spread.

EWS problems with home directories - resolvedAt 10:30am, users in EWS labs had d...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS problems with home directories - resolved

At 10:30am, users in EWS labs had difficulty accessing their home directories. The problem was traced to an issue with accessing a campus Active Directory domain controller and service was back to normal by 11am.

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.Following the server reboot, ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.

Following the server reboot, logins and home directories a back to normal performance.

EWS home directories experiencing extreme latency

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories experiencing extreme latency

EWS Home Directory performance back to normalAs of 8:30PM Monday 9/16, EWS home ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory performance back to normal

As of 8:30PM Monday 9/16, EWS home directory access has returned to normal operating performance.

Instructional EWS Home Directory Server ProblemsEWS home directories are severel...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Instructional EWS Home Directory Server Problems

EWS home directories are severely degraded, slowing or preventing logins from all EWS Linux computers and remote Linux servers. Engineering IT also has received reports that Windows logons are impacted by this problem. Engineering IT is investigating the problems. The current estimated time of remediation of these problems is 10:00 p.m.

EWS linux home directory access severely degradedEWS home directory access from ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS linux home directory access severely degraded

EWS home directory access from Linux clients and workstations is currently degraded. We are looking into this issue. Windows access to home directories appears to be normal.

EWS home directory emergency downtimeCurrently EWS home directories are only ava...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directory emergency downtime

Currently EWS home directories are only available from Windows workstations. The file server will be restarted at 11:15. Users should save their work. Announcements have been made in staffed EWS labs. Home directory access from both Windows and Linux will be available at 11:30PM.

EWS home directories back onlineWe continued to experience problems this evening...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories back online

We continued to experience problems this evening, and have some new error messages that may be helpful in troubleshooting our issue. Linux workstations home directory access became unavailable around 10:15PM. After some troubleshooting and investigation, we did an emergency reboot of storage at 11:15 and everything was back online as of 11:30. Our DCL and Everitt labs normally close at midnight, however their closing time has been extended to 1AM Friday so students working on assignments can have an extra hour.

EWS home directory server emergency reboot 10/8 11:00pmTo address performance pr...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directory server emergency reboot 10/8 11:00pm

To address performance problems, the home directory server will be rebooted at 11:00PMTo address performance problems, the EWS home directory server is being rebooted at 11:00pm tonight.To address performance problems, the EWS home directory server is being rebooted at 11:00pm tonight.

EWS home directory server emergency reboot 10/8 7:45pmTo address performance pro...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directory server emergency reboot 10/8 7:45pm

To address performance problems, the EWS home directory server is being rebooted at 7:45pm tonight.

EWS linux home directory access severely degradedAs of 3:45PM, linux home direct...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS linux home directory access severely degraded

As of 3:45PM, linux home directory access is severely degraded. We are working on the issue.

EWS home directory linux rebootNFS services on the EWS home directory server wil...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directory linux reboot

NFS services on the EWS home directory server will be restarted at 10:30PM to clear up linux login problems. Linux access will be back online by 10:40PM. Announcements have been made in all staffed labs.

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.Following the emergency reboo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.

Following the emergency reboot at 10:45PM, EWS home directory access is back to normal.

EWS Home Directory Emergency RebootWhile we have been able to bring Windows file...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory Emergency Reboot

While we have been able to bring Windows file access back online, linux clients are still experiencing issues. Storage servers will be rebooted at 10:40PM and should be available by 10:45. Please save your work and logout. Announcements have been made in all staffed EWS labs.

EWS Home Directories and Logins SlowEWS home directory access is extremely degra...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directories and Logins Slow

EWS home directory access is extremely degraded as of 8:25PM. We are working on this issue.

EWS home directories back onlineHome directories were back online around 12:20AM...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories back online

Home directories were back online around 12:20AM following an emergency reboot.

Slow EWS home directories reported at 10:15PMExtreme home directory latency was ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Slow EWS home directories reported at 10:15PM

Extreme home directory latency was reported from Linux and Windows labs around 10:15PM. Staff are troubleshooting the issue.

Regarding EWS lab performance issuesThis message is also posted on the From the ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Regarding EWS lab performance issues

This message is also posted on the From the CIO page.

On behalf of Engineering IT, my apologies for the stress and disruption caused you by the performance issues with the EWS labs. Considerable effort has been, and continues to be, spent to resolve these issues. The lab performance problems have likely seemed like a regular repeat of the same problem. Unfortunately for us, we have struggled with a series of different technical issues that have all caused the same end result: abysmally slow workstations and disrupted homework assignments.

Our performance problems are caused by our storage infrastructure, a setup that essentially took a single department-scaled solution and grew it to handle the entire College. Even though technical issues rather than capacity issues have been the primary problems, just scaling that solution was a mistake and one that I take full responsibility for. We are now going to do what we should have done much sooner: throw away our current storage infrastructure.

To implement an immediate solution, we are going to repurpose a number of new servers acquired for a different project. We have been actively talking with one of our peer Engineering colleges of comparable size and are going to mirror a configuration they have been successfully using.

For beyond this semester, we are going to do multiple things in order to ensure we never repeat these problems. First, engage instructors to better understand what they need EWS to be able to support for their courses. Second, engage students to better understand their work patterns and expectations for EWS. Third, bring in additional outside expertise (as we’ve done with our peer college for the short term solution) to assist with designing our long term storage solution.

We take great pride in the historical quality of the EWS labs and it pains us that these performance issues have occurred. I thank you for your feedback and patience and offer my apologies once more as we start down the road to rebuilding your confidence in the EWS labs and our ability to adequately manage all aspects them. We will be posting regular status updates and additional information to http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/ as we progress with both the short term and long term improvements.

We are working to schedule a town hall meeting for all students. We will hold it in a room where we can live stream it and record it for those not able to attend in person or online. We will provide a way for remote attendees to ask questions. As soon as the logistics are worked out, we’ll announce it at http://it.engineering.illinois.edu/ and also via email.

Please feel free to contact me directly at cthomp [at] illinois [dot] edu with any additional questions, comments, or suggestions that you have.

Chuck Thompson
Assistant Dean and Chief Information Officer
Engineering at Illinois

cpanel maintenanceSaturday, Oct. 13th: cpanel services have been migrated succes...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

cpanel maintenance

Saturday, Oct. 13th: cpanel services have been migrated successfully.

Original Announcement: Engineering IT staff will be moving portions of our cpanel service to another server on Saturday, Oct. 13th. Student websites will be visible but not editable for approximately one hour during the 9am-noon Maintenance Window.

Remlnx reboot Thursday, September 27, 6am-7amThe EWS remlnx servers will be rebo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Remlnx reboot Thursday, September 27, 6am-7am

The EWS remlnx servers will be rebooted on Thursday, September 27 between 6am and 7am. Advance warning will be given to currently logged in users.

EWS Workstation Kernel Version RollbackAll EWS Linux machines will be rebooted t...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Workstation Kernel Version Rollback

All EWS Linux machines will be rebooted throughout the evening to rollback the kernel in an effort to resolve recent storage server issues. This will not affect active users as machines will only be rebooted when they are not in use. remlnx will be rebooted during the daily scheduled morning maintenance window around 6AM.

Update: Monday morning EWS Home Directory ProblemsUPDATE: As of 10:40AM, EWS st...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Update: Monday morning EWS Home Directory Problems

UPDATE: As of 10:40AM, EWS storage is back online and operational. Technicians continue to work on diagnosing the cause of this outage.

Reports of degraded performance of the Engineering IT EWS home directories were received around 9AM this morning. Technicians are working on this problem.

EVA5000 retirementSaturday, Oct 13th: Due to technical problems, DCSFILES could ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EVA5000 retirement

Saturday, Oct 13th: Due to technical problems, DCSFILES could not be completely migrated within the maintenance window. Engineering IT staff will continue working on the issue and will reschedule the move as soon as possible.

Original Announcement: On Saturday, October 13th, Engineering IT staff will move the following servers currently on the HP EVA5000 in order to retire some of our older server hardware:

dcs-webapps
dcs-webmaint
DCSFILES

These moves will take place during our Major Maintenance Window, 8am-noon, during which time users may be unable to access their files on these servers for an hour or more.

Unplanned server outagesA hard drive on the engr_storage array had hardware prob...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Unplanned server outages

A hard drive on the engr_storage array had hardware problems that caused it to enter a endless read loop, effectively making the entire array unavailable to all servers that used it until the hard drive was replaced. Most Engineering virtual servers use the engr_storage array which meant that they also paused until the hard drive was replaced and, in several cases, the virtual servers shut down automatically.

Engineering IT staff are on site and have replaced the failed hard drive. The virtual servers that shut down or went into read-only mode are being checked. All virtual servers should return to service soon.

EWS users who were using svn services were affected by this outage and logins for Windows lab machines could not complete properly for at least an hour.

ENGR-FILE01 file server shut down and was unavailable during the outage. Some data volumes will be unavailable while they're being checked for data corruption.

Electrical problems and server outagesEarly Tuesday monring, an electrical probl...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Electrical problems and server outages

Early Tuesday monring, an electrical problem damaged the UPS and reset network hardware in the Siebel data center. Electricty was restored quickly but damaged network hardware blocked access to the virtual servers until the network equipment could be restored. Some servers, virtual and physical, did not automatically restart correctly and were also unavailable until after they were manually restarted.

The outage started at approximately 5:40am and services began to be available starting at approximately 11:00am.

All servers have been returned to service, but if you encounter any problems, please let Engineering IT know by sending e-mail to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu

Cooling system failure at Engineering Hall data center.Update 6:30pm: Chilled wa...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Cooling system failure at Engineering Hall data center.

Update 6:30pm: Chilled water service has been restored to Engineering Hall and all servers in the data center have been returned to service.

Original announcement (10:00am): Several servers have shut down due to high heat at our Engineering Hall data center. Engineering IT staff are on site and we are working on getting cooling restored. In the meantime, all servers there will be shut down. Several mechse, mntl, and cts servers will be down until temperatures can be restored to a safe level.

The following servers are affected: cts-net01, cts-net02, cts-file01, cts-file02, mechse-srv1,mechse-srv2,mechse-srv3, mntl-shared02, mntl-shared03, and mntl-shared04.

EWS home directories inacessible from WindowsThe EWS home directories are were i...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories inacessible from Windows

The EWS home directories are were inaccessible from Windows workstations from approximately 3:30PM to 4:00PM on Monday, Novermber 26. This issue has been resolved.

EWS Home Directories Now AvailableEWS home directories were unavailable from 5PM...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directories Now Available

EWS home directories were unavailable from 5PM-6PM. This issue has been resolved and we will continue to monitor the situation.

EWS Home Directory Access Highly DegradedEWS home directory access is highly deg...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory Access Highly Degraded

EWS home directory access is highly degraded. We are working on this issue.

remlnx reboot at 5PMThe EWS remote linux environment, remlnx.ews.illinois.edu wi...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

remlnx reboot at 5PM

The EWS remote linux environment, remlnx.ews.illinois.edu will be rebooted at 5PM to clear up stale NFS handles that are causing poor performance. This service will be back online by 5:15PM. Lab users on console will not be affected by this reboot.

Friday, September 21 EWS Home Directory Storage DegradedIn an effort to resolve ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Friday, September 21 EWS Home Directory Storage Degraded

In an effort to resolve degraded performance of the Engineering IT home directory service, the EWS home directory server will undergo an emergency reboot at 3:10PM. EWS home directories should be back online by 3:30. In-lab users have been notified of this unplanned outage.

Update: As of 3:40PM, following the reboot, slow performance issues appear to be resolved.

EWS Storage IssuesUpdate (Sept. 18th): After various stability issues this past ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Storage Issues

Update (Sept. 18th): After various stability issues this past weekend due to simultaneous highly resource intensive MP assignments during peak usage times, Infrastructure staff has made a number of adjustments to the NFS file server that as of this morning seem to have resulted in overall better file system performance. Performance of the system is being closely monitored.

Update (Sept. 14th): Engineering IT has update hardware and reconfigured the EWS home directory server to use a different version of NFS protocol. Tests have indicated this will reduce or eliminate the delays and degradation of service experienced by EWS users, however peak usage by large numbers of users will be necessary to determine if the problem is solved completely.

Original Announcement: Since mid-afternoon on Thursday, September 13, the Engineering IT home directory storage used in the instructional lab environment (EWS Labs) has been experiencing intermittent outages during peak usage times. Engineering IT Infrastructure support staff are dilligently working on addressing this problem. Please check back here for future details regarding the resolution of this issue.

UC services reach College faculty, staffEngineering at Illinois users continue t...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

UC services reach College faculty, staff

Engineering at Illinois users continue to embrace Unified Communications, or UC, a major, campus-wide technology initiative designed to unify email, voice, instant messaging and other collaboration tools.

Joel Franzen, the Engineering IT professional tasked with leading the College’s conversion from landlines to UC and its interface, Lync, noted that Engineering is quickly approaching 100% staff participation, with very few complications reported since the transition began February 13.

“I think the rollout went really well,” Franzen added. “We did not see a major influx in problems.”

Franzen credits the Engineering IT User Services contacts and Unit Telecomm Coordinators with the smooth transition to UC. “The staff was prepared, the help desk was prepared. … Engineering was one of the most prepared groups on campus.”

Users have reported that the new services provided within UC are proving helpful to their daily work. Bryan Kieft, an office support associate in the Materials Science and Engineering department, finds the “voicemail in email” a helpful and efficient feature.

“The voicemail is far easier to organize, save, and listen to messages than the old system,” Kieft said.

Kieft adds that he hasn’t had the opportunity to take advantage of the instant messaging function as much as he had expected, but he encourages users to take part. “(Instant messaging) is much more convenient to convey certain kinds of information and sometimes easier to ask someone a question while I am on the phone with someone else.”

As a user-support professional, Franzen has personally been pleased with the desktop sharing function. In this feature, the user can give access to anyone to see the screen or application he or she is actively working in, giving a visual component to collaboration that one can’t easily get with emails or phone calls.

For Franzen, “It means I can help (the users) faster,” particularly when they are located in a different part of the College.

The primary feedback continues to be: If you use it, you’ll like it. Those who are participating in UC want other staff and faculty to participate in the Lync environment, too.

Kieft encourages his fellow Engineering employees to take a class or have an Engineering IT professional assist with set up, if they haven’t done so already. Training sessions and presentations are available free of charge through the FAST3 program, for both Microsoft Outlook (email and calendaring) and Microsoft Lync (voice and IM).

Engineering employees who have not made the switch to UC and Lync are encouraged to do so soon. The UC Project has set a June deadline for the changeover from landlines to the new system. As that deadline nears, Franzen anticipates users will realize they need to take steps to use the new system, including obtaining a communication device and contacting their support personnel, which may create a backlog in service. Contacting your Engineering IT User Services professional now will facilitate the process and aid in preventing a disruption in service after the June deadline.

Employees are also reminded to fill out their E911 Acknowledgement Form. This form is required by federal regulation for all Voice over IP (VOIP) deployments such as Lync. For more information about E911 with UC Voice, visit the CITES E911 information page.

For assistance regarding UC or any IT issue, please contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] eduor your Engineering IT support professional. For more information on UC or to provide feedback about the UC project, please contact uc-uft [at] illinois [dot] edu.

In addition, the following resources may be of interest to UC users:

Student consultants neededEngineering IT, the provider of information services f...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Student consultants needed

Engineering IT, the provider of information services for the College of Engineering, is currently hiring students for EWS lab support, video lecture capture, scrap-surplus operations, IT help desk, and research IT support. All new student appointments will start at the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester.

If you are interested in working for Engineering IT, please complete an Engineering IT Student Consultation Application.

RESOLVED: engr-storage currently onlineThe engr-storage server is back online an...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: engr-storage currently online

The engr-storage server is back online and all virtual machines should be operational. Please report any problems to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu

Physics Network Problems - ResolvedConnections from some client machines in ESB ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Physics Network Problems - Resolved

Connections from some client machines in ESB to the DHCP servers in Loomis were failing. This was due to a problem with ESB firewall. The firewall was restarted and the DHCP service was restored at 5:48pm.

Weekend server maintenanceUpdate: (August 11th) The hardware issue has been sol...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Weekend server maintenance

Update: (August 11th) The hardware issue has been solved and Engineering Storage system is back online. All other storage system maintenance was completed successfully. Sunday's maintenance window will not be used as all goals were completed with Saturday's work. Thank you for your patience.

Update: The work done today (August 11th) on the Engineering Storage systems has revealed a problem with our network hardware. Engineering storage will be down for two more hours in order for us to try to repair or replace the networking parts. Additional time on Sunday may be required.

August 9, 2012

In preparation for the Fall 2012 semester start, we will be updating and replacing hardware in the servers that provide data storage to many of Engineering IT's services on Saturday, August 11th. The maintenance is not for the services themselves but because they are dependent on the storage systems, the services will not be available while work is being done. Services affected include: subversion, smartphysics, EWS home directories and related services, cpanel, Engineering file services, DCShome and faculty web sites, engr-wintools, as well as all centrally provided virtual machines.

The Engineering web portal and Engineering wiki systems should not be affected by the maintenance outage.

Work will begin at 9am and the outage is expected to last until 5pm, Saturday. We will continue patching and upgrading on Sunday starting at 9am if necessary.

Engineering IT claims its 10,000th ticketIt took about eight months to decide on...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Engineering IT claims its 10,000th ticket

It took about eight months to decide on a ticket system and six months to implement one, but it only took a couple of months for Engineering IT to respond to its 10,000^thticket.

Tickets are submitted requests to Engineering IT, and they are tracked through the Request Tracker (RT) ticket system. RT keeps track of tickets sent to the various Engineering IT departments, coordinating tasks and managing requests among a community of users at the University of Illinois.

Kathleen Booth, IT Specialist for the College of Engineering at Illinois, nabbed the 10,000^th ticket, which Dave Mussulman, Senior IT Specialist, had placed a bounty on. Booth was surprised by how quickly Engineering IT reached 10,000 tickets, linking the large volume to the quantity of issues the department handles and a successful migration into the new ticket system.

“I actually received a page from Danny (Tang, IT Specialist) saying ‘I just noticed that the 10,000^th ticket belongs to you, congrats!’ which was a surprise to me,” Booth said.

She may have only received a free lunch, but as project manager for the creation of the ticket system, Booth seems wholly satisfied with the ticket system’s success.

The ticket system’s origination stemmed from an inefficient and varied environment that involved multiple ticket systems, along with various mail groups and resource mailboxes.

“It was unwieldy and most departments followed a department-specific workflow that often had little to do with how another department worked,” Booth said. “This was a penalty to providing consistent levels of service and easily being able to back each other up, and anything that crossed divisions risked delays due to lack of consistent communication paths.”

Upon assuming the role of project manager, Booth said her committee was tasked with developing a workflow design to handle requests, with the assumption that it would be applied to the pre-existing ticket system. But after the upgrade proved to be unusable, the committee decided to develop something new.

The workflow design took most of the committee’s time. This is where it was decided how various divisions would interact and how issues that involved multiple Engineering IT staffers would be handled. They also established the workflow’s path, starting with a ticket’s entry point through one of the various departments to the resolution of the problem. This design led to the requirements for a ticket system, and eventually resulted in RT.

Mussulman said there was some hesitancy among Engineering IT staff members upon the system’s implementation, but the department as a whole has settled into the RT ticket system. The 10,000^th ticket bounty created a healthy competition among staffers, and Mussulman hopes the allure of the 20,000^th ticket will do the same.

“We’re just scared that (the 20,000^th ticket) will be spam,” he said.

Along with improving inter-divisional interactions, Booth said the RT ticket system helps the department to recognize when an issue is very widespread, allowing the problem to be filtered through Engineering IT’s various levels and solve the problem.

Booth is proud of the ticket system she helped create, noting how it’s done as much for the Engineering IT department as it has for its customers.

“I think it has had a unifying effect and improved our service,” she said.

EVA Storage Array is down8/24 Update: Mailman was successfully migrated and dcs-...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EVA Storage Array is down

8/24 Update: Mailman was successfully migrated and dcs-db1 is running again.

8/23 Update: Attempts to use a "loaner" battery failed yesterday so we overnighted a replacement set of batteries which arrived this afternoon and worked. The controllers appear to be working normally and all services except for mailman and dcs-db1 have been restored. We are attempting to migrate mailman to another storage device and are determining which dcs-db1 databases can be restored.

Update: The EVA5000 controllers use batteries to protect the cache. All four batteries have failed, probably because they're ten years old, at the same time and the controllers will not work without a functioning battery. We are trying to locate a replacement battery in the area. Until we have a replacement, the EVA5000 will continue to be unavailable.

Original announcement: The HP EVA5000 storage system is experiencing problems with its fibre channel controllers. We are attempting to repair them now and will have to power down the system. Currently, services that use the EVA system are inaccessible becauseof the problem and will continue to be unavailable during the repair.

The following is a list of known services that are affected:

mailman archives
dcs-db1 volumes
dcs-config - affects NetReg
dcs-webapps
dcs-webmaint
DCS-FILES - includes many older versions of class web pages and several research volumes.

Server Maintenance on Sept. 8thSaturday, September 8th: Maintenance has been com...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Server Maintenance on Sept. 8th

Saturday, September 8th: Maintenance has been completed successfully. Databases have been moved to a virtual server. Applications and web pages that use those databases should be functioning normally again.

Original Announcement: During the 9am - noon maintenance period, Saturday, September 8th, Engineering IT will be migrating several databases off of server hardware that has recently shown signs of failing. During this time, the databases will be moved from physical hardware to a virtual server and will therefore be inaccessible. Engineering websites that use Stela and Piazza will not function properly while the databases are being moved.

Engineering IT's Ticket System Down

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Engineering IT's Ticket System Down

EWS student home directory maintenanceSeptember 13th: Maintenance is complete. ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS student home directory maintenance

September 13th: Maintenance is complete. Home directories are available again.

Original announcement: Engineering IT will be upgrading and testing the operating system on the EWS student home directory servers during the 5:30-7:30am maintenance window Thursday morning. EWS students will not be able to access their home directory remotely or from EWS computer labs during this time. The outage is expected to last 60-90 minutes.

Engineering IT website launchedWelcome to the new website for Engineering IT Sha...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Engineering IT website launched

Welcome to the new website for Engineering IT Shared Services!

Until the launch of this site on Jan. 9, 2012, Engineering IT has had only a limited web presence from the time the organization was first formed on July 1, 2010. Most information about us and our services was either not available or was located only on the former departmental IT group websites. The launch of this website is an important step in ensuring that everyone we serve has the information they need about the services we offer, how to use those services, and how to contact us when assistance is needed.

This website really belongs to the faculty, students and staff of Engineering at Illinois, as well as those who use the services provided by Engineering IT. We need to hear from you regarding what information you need us to have available here. What isn't here yet that you would like prioritized? What is here that you find to be incomplete or not clear?

Your feedback is extremely important to us. Please email all questions, comments, suggestions, and concerns about this site to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu. Thanks in advance for taking the time to provide your feedback.

We look forward to working with you.

Chuck Thompson
Assistant Dean and Director, Engineering IT Shared Services
Engineering at Illinois

EWS Home Directory Storage will be rebooted at 11:45AMEWS Home Directory Storage...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory Storage will be rebooted at 11:45AM

EWS Home Directory Storage will be rebooted at 11:45AM in an attempt to resolve slow access times. Users in labs and using remote access should save their files.

Maintenance window moved to SundaySunday, March 10, 2013 - Maintenance has been ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Maintenance window moved to Sunday

Sunday, March 10, 2013 - Maintenance has been completed.

Original announcement - This month's major maintenance window has been moved from Saturday, March 9th, to Sunday, March 10th in order to avoid impacting Engineering Open House. The following maintenance will take place bewteen 10am and 1pm, Sunday:

Engineering IT will be upgrading networking hardware that is used by our VM cluster and EWS remote linux. While this work is being done, services hosted on virtual servers and the EWS remote linux service may be inaccessible for brief periods of time.
Engineering IT will reconfigure the disk configuration on Engr-file-01. Access to documents or shares on the server may be interrupted while the configuration is being modified.
Engineering IT will ugrade the hard drives on engr-storage1 and dcs-sunstor1. Access to files on these servers may possibly be interrupted during the maintenance window.

RESOLVED: User Home Directory Connection IssuesUpdated Status: March 21, 2013. ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: User Home Directory Connection Issues

Updated Status:

March 21, 2013. 9:40 AM

The issue with home directory connections on Windows systems has been resolved. Some users may need to log out and log back into their systems to re-establish connection.

Original Message:

March 21, 2013. 9:05 AM

Engineering IT is currently experiencing problems with user connections to home directories from Windows systems. We are actively investigating the issue and hope to have access restored shortly. If you have an urgent need to access your home directory please email engrit-help and we can provide a work-around.

engineering wiki briefly unavailableThe SSL certificate for wiki.engr.illinois.e...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

engineering wiki briefly unavailable

The SSL certificate for wiki.engr.illinois.edu was unexpectedly revoked at noon today. Users of the Engineering wiki service were unable to use the web site until the problem was resolved at approximately 1:30pm.

RESOLVED: wiki.engr.illinois.edu unavailbleRESOLVED: The problem with wiki.engr...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

RESOLVED: wiki.engr.illinois.edu unavailble

RESOLVED: The problem with wiki.engr.illinois.edu has been resolved. All spaces are now accessible. Please report any problems or issues with the wiki service to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" id="Engineering IT Help Desk email">engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu

Original Problem Description:

After the patching of the server operating system for wiki.engr.illinois.edu, wiki spaces that have anonymous access enabled apparently stopped working. Engineering IT staff are working on the problem, and all wiki spaces may be unavailable for periods of time this morning (Wednesday, May 15, 2013) until this problem is resolved.

Scheduled outage for Physics serversThe server room in Loomis is scheduled to be...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Scheduled outage for Physics servers

The server room in Loomis is scheduled to be renovated this summer, so the following servers will be unavilable while they are being moved on Thursday, May 23rd:

phyori - home directory service for physics faculty and other services
v1 - host for phyfire, phyotto, phyunan, and netmaster.
v2 - host for phycinco, phyku, physes, and phytau.

Phyori is being migrated into Engineering's virtual server infrastructure and the process will take 16 or more hours. It is expected to be back in service late Friday.

V1 and V2 are being physically moved to the nearby data center in MRL and should return to service later on Thursday.

COMPLETE: Physics server outageThe physical servers V1 and V2 were successfull...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

COMPLETE: Physics server outage

The physical servers V1 and V2 were successfully moved from 222 Loomis to the data center in MRL and were back online at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 23rd.

The physical server phyori.physics.illinois.edu was successfully converted to a virtual machine and back online by 11:30 a.m. Friday, May 24th.

Any questions or comments about these machines or the services provided by these machines should be directed to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" id="Engineering IT Help Desk email" title="Engineering IT Help Desk email">engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu

Widespread server outages - recoveringAn unusual network hardware problem isolat...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Widespread server outages - recovering

An unusual network hardware problem isolated the eight servers that hold the majority of Engineering web sites (including this web site) and several services at 8:45am Tuesday morning. The web sites and servers hosted by these eight machines were unable to reliably access their network based storage, which caused them to shut down or fail in unpredictble ways.

The network problem was found and repaired, but the slow process of restarting each server continues. Most outward facing services have been restored but the process is expected to take until 5pm.

Note that this outage is unrelated to the outage of our ticketing system, which is hosted off site. The two outages happening at nearly the same time compounded issues with diagnosing and reporting problems.

Should an outage of this nature occur again in the future, please keep in mind that the Engineering IT help desk is available via phone at 333-1313 during normal business hours. The help desk can help users even when multiple servers and services are down.

Planned network outagesCITES has announced that they will be updating the firmwa...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Planned network outages

CITES has announced that they will be updating the firmware on all network switches and routers across campus this weekend. Engineering buildings are expected to be affected between 5:30am and 9am on Sunday, June 23rd. During these outages, some IT services may be inaccessible but not for extended periods of time.

David Anderson and Stephanie Ognar honored with scholarshipsScholarship funds ar...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

David Anderson and Stephanie Ognar honored with scholarships

Scholarship funds are currently being established to honor two Engineering IT employees that recently passed away: David Anderson and Stephanie Ognar.

David Anderson

The David Anderson “Neo” Award will award one staff member and one student worker within Engineering IT. This award will be given annually to an individual whose could be compared with the passion and dedication David Anderson demonstrated during his lifetime.

Formerly a Senior Systems Administrator for Engineering IT, David died in December 2012 after complications from heart surgery. The name “Neo” derives from the famous film The Matrix, which features a heroic character named “Mr. Anderson”. The name "Neo" stuck with David Anderson, as did the qualities of persistence, dedication, and the pursuit of reliable, flexible IT services.

After 8 years of serving in the military, David worked at Amdocs in Champaign before becoming a student worker for TSG. He finished his Computer Science degree in 2005 and became a full time employee of TSG after graduation. Not only did he bring his enterprise systems experience from his military service and Amdocs employment, he also had the perspective of students in mind as he created services and resolved problems for the Department of Computer Science and the College of Engineering.

Stephanie Ognar

The Stephanie Ognar Memorial Scholarship Fund was established by family members, colleagues, and classmates in honor of Stephanie Ognar. The fund, established with the University of Illinois Foundation, will allow the School of Art + Design in the College of Fine and Applied Arts to award a scholarship in honor of Stephanie.

Stephanie received her BFA in Art Education, MFA in Art and Design, and MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois. She resided in Champaign and worked as an artist and information professional at the University of Illinois.

Stephanie displayed her artwork in various museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe, and much of her web-based work can be found on her personal website. In 2009 she received a month-long residency fellowship from the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming.

You can make personal contributions to the Stephanie Ognar Memorial Scholarship Fund online.

EWS Home Directories and Logins SlowEWS home directory access and workstation lo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directories and Logins Slow

EWS home directory access and workstation logins are very slow as of 2PM Saturday. We are currently looking into the issue.

Resolved: homes.ews.illinois.edu 3/7/2013 8:57am8:57am 3/7/2013 Shortly after p...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Resolved: homes.ews.illinois.edu 3/7/2013 8:57am

8:57am 3/7/2013

Shortly after posting the notice of the Engineering Workstation Home Directories being unavailble the issue was resolved. Home directories in both linux and windows should work as expected. If you are continuing to have issues please let us know by sending an email to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

3/7/2013

The EWS home directory service is currently down. Users may experience extremely long log in times on both windows and linux systems. Once logged in the users files will not be available. The engineering IT infrastructure team is currently looking into the issue. Updates to the condition will be posted as we have them.

Resolved: subversion.engr.illinois.edu downtime 3/1/2013There was an issue with ...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Resolved: subversion.engr.illinois.edu downtime 3/1/2013

There was an issue with the web authentication on subversion.engr.illinois.edu betwen 6:32am and 10:25am on 3/1/2013. During this period users were unable to access subversion repositories. The issue has been resolved.

Content restricted to student rosters on courses.engr and wiki.engr inaccessible...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Content restricted to student rosters on courses.engr and wiki.engr inaccessible by students from 9:05 am until 1:35 pm today

The daily refresh of roster data from the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) failed early this morning in such a way that it did not report a failure. At 9:05 am, the process which synchs roster data to UOFI Active Directory groups removed student accounts from most of the class roster groups. These groups are used to control access to the secure folders in class websites hosted on courses.engr.illinois.edu, as well as on class wiki spaces restricted to registered students on wiki.engr.illinois.edu. The issue was discovered/reported to EngrIT at 12:58 pm and the roster group synch process was restarted shortly thereafter. The roster groups were successfully refilled with current students by 1:35 pm.

EWS Storage Problems Resolved Without RebootThe EWS home directory storage probl...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Storage Problems Resolved Without Reboot

The EWS home directory storage problem has been resolved without requiring the previously announced reboot. We will continue to monitor the systems closely.

Slow Home Directory Access From Linux ClientsWe were aware of reports of slow ac...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Slow Home Directory Access From Linux Clients

We were aware of reports of slow access to EWS home directories in Linux labs and on the remote servers during peak usage times that stared around 9:15PM on 12/11. Windows workstation directory access seems was normally. Technicians looked into this issue and performance improved after midnight on 12/12.

Physics home directories unavailableSunday 11am The server has been rebooted and...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Physics home directories unavailable

Sunday 11am

The server has been rebooted and is now running normally.

Original announcement

The server, phyori.physics.illinois.edu, is down which will affect physics home directories. Engineering IT staff have been unable to remotely restart it. Due to the holidays, staffing has been reduced significantly and response time will, unfortuately, be slow. We will have staff on-site within a few hours.

EWS Home Directory Storage Down for maintenanceEWS Home Directory Storage is dow...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory Storage Down for maintenance

EWS Home Directory Storage is down for file system maintenance. We anticipate maintenance to be completed and back online late in the day on Monday, January 7.

Cooling system failure in Siebel Center.Monday 4pm: The cloud cluster testbed is...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Cooling system failure in Siebel Center.

Monday 4pm: The cloud cluster testbed is operational again. All services are back to normal.

Sunday 4pm: The cause of the cooling problems at Siebel Center was a break in the water main on the north side of campus that caused problems with the chilled water system for many Engineering buildings. While we don't have any official word regarding the work Facilities and Services have been putting into fixing the pipe, the cooling system at Siebel Center returned to normal Sunday afternoon. Most servers in the fourth floor data centers are back up, however the cloud computing testbed is not working at this time.

Original announcement: Early Sunday morning, the cooling systems for two data centers in Siebel Center failed. Temperatures are high enough that servers have shut down. The cloud computing cluster testbed and various research related servers located in room 4107 will also be down until cooling can be restored. Facilities and Services have been contacted.

EWS Home Directory Storage Back Online Following MaintenanceThe EWS home directo...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Home Directory Storage Back Online Following Maintenance

The EWS home directory storage is now back online, following successful file system maintenance.

COMPLETE: Server maintenanceUpdated Status: Complete All systems are back onlin...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

COMPLETE: Server maintenance

Updated Status: Complete

All systems are back online as of 11:34 a.m. Any problems with EWS student home directories, DCShome, the Engineering Portal, the Engineering Wiki, or other Engineering IT Services, please open a ticket to Engineering IT by sending email to engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu" id="Engineering IT Help Desk email" title="Engineering IT Help Desk email">engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu

Original Message:

Engineering IT will be replacing and upgrading the disk controllers on our EqualLogic storage system during the Major Maintenance Window, Saturday January 12th, from 7am to 11am.

This storage system is used by the EWS student home directories, DCSHome, Engineering Portal, Engineering Wiki, and several virtual servers. These systems may be unavailable for periods of time during the maintenance window.

Urgent Java Update Tonight (1/14/2013)Jan 15th, 2013. 4:00 PM At this time, 99....

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Urgent Java Update Tonight (1/14/2013)

Jan 15th, 2013. 4:00 PM

At this time, 99.3% of Engineering IT managed desktops have received the patch and should now be secure. Some users required an additional update for Banner to work again, but we believe those issues are also now resolved. As always, if you need assistance, contact engrit-help [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Jan 14th, 2013. 3:30 PM

On January 10, Oracle confirmed the existence of a severe security vulnerability in its Java browser plugin product and released a fix for that vulnerability January 13th.

For administrative faculty and staff, and instructional labs:

We will deploy the patch to all workstations managed by Engineering IT tonight. Our belief at this time is that the patch installation will be invisible to the user. However it is possible some users will be prompted by a security pop-up window asking to allow the install, or might lose an open web browsing session.

**For most faculty, grad students and researchers:

We recommend that anyone with a personal or privately managed system take immediate action and apply the patches as Oracle recommends in their announcement yesterday. See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alert-cve-2013-0422-1896849.html

Drew MacGregor moves on from Engineering IT after fourteen years of service Aft...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

Drew MacGregor moves on from Engineering IT after fourteen years of service

After fourteen years of service in the Engineering IT department, Drew MacGregor is moving on to work with Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) as manager of digital media.

After studying at both DePauw University and Miami, MacGregor was hired by the University of Illinois’ Computer Science department. He worked with video streaming and was hired to help transfer the department’s learning program online.

MacGregor set up lecture recording at the University of Illinois and transferred them to a school in India the department had a contract with online. In the course of his career with Engineering IT, MacGregor helped build the video streaming capture infrastructure, and eventually moved from recording 20 lectures per week to up to 140 per week.

This infrastructure was built alongside the online Computer Science program—a project aided by several departments. MacGregor called it a “triangle support” system, with help coming from academics, Engineering IT, and the Office of Online and Professional Engineering Programs.

Another major project MacGregor worked on was serving on the building committee for the new Siebel Center. He helped design the classrooms and studio.

Scott Cimarusti said he worked on the grand opening of the center with MacGregor, coordinating the audio and video support for the event while construction on the building was still being completed. Together they assembled equipment and created a makeshift functional system for the audience, which included high-ranking campus administration, local politicians, and Tom Siebel himself. In addition, they had to get the center’s video wall working just two days before the ceremony.

“To me, that experience working with Drew is representative of the kind of colleague and person he is,” Cimarusti said. “Dedicated, creative, personable, and generous with his time and knowledge.”

Moving on to CITES, MacGregor’s role as manager of digital media is less IT-focused, but the experience he accrued while working on the Computer Science’s online prorgram lends itself to his new, much bigger project.

“The main initiative is to get a new distribution system for the campus up and going that’s virtually findable and usable by people. It’s an extension, or the next step of what we were doing in Engineering IT, but just on a larger scale.”

Looking back on his stint at Engineering IT, both the experience of the job and the bond with his co-workers made it difficult to leave. In fourteen years, he joked that “there were only about five days” he didn’t want to come to work.

“Sometimes you leave a job because of the people you work with, and sometimes you stay at a job longer than you would have because of the people,” he said. “Because of the people I worked with and worked for, it made it really possible to avoid those bad days.”

EWS Linux software updates for Spring 2013The following software has been update...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS Linux software updates for Spring 2013

The following software has been updated on EWS Linux workstations (and remote access servers) for Spring 2013. This software has become the default version from the menus and command line.

Mentor Graphics - HDL Designer 2012.1
Mentor Graphics - ModelSim SE 10.1d
Mentor Graphics - Precision Synthesis PS2012b
Cadence - Encounter Digital Implementation System 11.1 (EDI110)
Cadence - Virtuoso IC6.1.5 (IC615)
Cadence - MMSIM 11.1
OCaml 4.00.1

The Intel compiler and parallel tools have been upgraded and their paths changed. All Intel software is now available at /opt/intel on EWS Linux systems.

Intel - Parallel Studio XE 2013u1 (Inspector, Advisor, Composer, VTune)

The following software has been installed, but is not the default version (previous versions may still exist, but these newer alternatives are available).

Apache Ant 1.8.4
Android SDK r21.0.1
Android NDK r8d

For questions or software support, please contact ews [at] illinois [dot] edu" href="mailto:ews [at] illinois [dot] edu">ews [at] illinois [dot] edu.

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.As of 5:30PM, EWS home direct...

Joshua Potts — Thu 18 Sep 2014 09:16 CST

EWS home directories and logins are back to normal.

As of 5:30PM, EWS home directory storage has resumed normal operating speeds. Staff will continue to monitor storage health.

Engineering IT Shared Services Announcements - U of I

EXTENDED: EWS Home Directories Storage Upgrade extended through August 12, 2024 ...

RESOLVED: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Ho...

Notice: Unexpected login issues on FastX related to the EWS Home Directory Stora...

Notice: Unexpected login issues on EWS Windows computers related to the EWS Ho...

Postponed: EWS Home Directories Storage Upgrade will now be August 5-9, 2024 ...

Notice: EWS Home Directories Unavailable 7/29-8/2 for Scheduled Maintenance W...

Delays Receiving Emails to ENGRIT-HELP When: Monday, April 29, 2023 at 12:51p...

Resolved: Campus Authentication Issues Impact to Portal Applications Who: Por...

NOTICE: CS VM FARM CONSOLE ACCESS AND AUTHENTICATION OUTAGE WHEN: Thursday...

ALERT: Engineering IT GITLAB OUTAGE When: Sunday, December 3, 2023 What: E...

Resolved: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavai...

Update: Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders May Be Unavaila...

Engineering Administration Home and Dept. Shared Folders Unavailable Audience...

Notice: Network Issues in Some Units When: 8 am CST, 04/21/2023 What: Duri...

Grad Apps Time Outs and Portal Delays What: Grad Apps in the Engineering Port...

Resolved: Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down What: Some machines in the...

Some CS Virtual Machines (CSVM) are Down What: Some machines in the CSVM Farm...

When: March 15, 2023 What: The Technology Services Office of Privacy and Cy...

Resolved EWS FastX Service When: February 24th, 2023, 12:01am to 2pm CST D...

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service, Websites When: 3pm to 3:20pm ...

RESOLVED: Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable What: Mediaspace is currently una...

Kaltura Mediaspace is Unavailable What: Mediaspace is currently unavailable ...

RESOLVED: Grainger College of Engineering Websites Unavailable AUDIENCE: Enti...

RESOLVED Engineering Portal Errors - EDW Outage When: Approximately 8:03 a.m....

UPDATE: Zoom.us Outage Resolved What: Zoom Outage in US When: 1:15pm CST, ...

Zoom.us Outage What: Zoom Outage in US When: 1:15pm CST, Thursday, Novembe...

Resolved: Degraded Engineering Portal Service What: Engineering Portal Degr...

Degraded Engineering Portal Service What: Engineering Portal Degraded Wh...

What: Maintenance was performed on gitlab.engr.illinois.edu to perform critical ...

*Resolved* WHAT: EWS home directories and class directories were unavailable to ...

Resolved as of 12:30pm, per their status page Echo360 is reporting a nationwide...

Echo360 is reporting a nationwide degraded performance with capture processing. ...

RESOLVED as of 12/8/2021 at 9:00am : AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and...

AWS Outage - Echo360, AWS Console Page, and other AWS dependent Services Audien...

Closed: Some CS Virtual Machines not powering on Services affected: student v...

Printers in departmental computer labs may be unavailable Who: Printers in depa...

*RESOLVED* What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage i...

What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage is unreachab...

**Resolved: NFS home directories on Instructional Services Issue** Thank you ...

**Completed: Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance** Who: Engineering GitL...

Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance Who: Engineering GitLab users Timefra...

**Resolved: Virtual Machine Outage - PPSB Data Center**Who:Impact seems limited ...

*Updated: New Support Ticket Creations via Email Delayed - Fixed*Audience: Engin...

**Update: Zoom Outage - Resolved**Timeframe: 8:15 a.m. - 10 a.m Monday, August 2...

*Resolved* Multiple virtual machines currently unavailable.Update: Affected VMs ...

**Resolved** Echo360 Outage - National ImpactWho: Instructors and Students with ...

**UPDATE: Engineering IT Help Ticketing Service - Resolved**Timeframe: 3 p.m. Fr...

**UPDATE: FastX - Outage - Resolved**Timeframe: 9:00 p.m. Friday, April 3, 2020 ...

*NOTICE:Student Home Directories - Storage Limitations, Quota Reached*Who: Stude...

*Update: Student Home Directories Maintenance Complete*The Student Home Director...

**Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage** Timeframe: Friday, January 10that ...

*Notice: Student Home Directories Will Be Unavailable During Maintenance*Service...

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity Improveme...

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity IssuesIss...

UPDATE: EWS Windows Student Home Directories Intermittent Connectivity IssuesIss...

** Completed: Planned Maintenance: EWS home directories, Thursday Sept 26, 6:00a...

**Completed: Citrix Maintenance – Outage**Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21s...

**Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage** Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21sta...

*ALERT*: DOCUSIGN Phishing MessageWho: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff, ...

**RESOLVED** EWS Linux Home Directories UnavailableWho: Engineering Students and...

**RESOLVED** Engineering Administrative File System UnavailableWho: Engineering ...

We are aware of an issue with the server engradmin-file-01.engr.illinois.edu whi...

**RESOLVED**cPanel OutageWHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:cPanel...

**ALERT** cPanel Outage6/9/2019WHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:...

Engineering IT Shared Services Help Desks change to Summer Hours and Coverage be...

**ALERT** Ongoing Email Spoofing Attack 4/28/2019Greetings. This message is bein...

**RESOLVED** EWS Home directories and EWS Class directories unavailable 26 Apr 2...

RESOLVED: MATLAB opening error, licensing server problemsOn March 4th 2019, from...

**NOTICE** - Unavailabilty of serveral research servers, Physics and MRL home di...

**NOTICE** - 30 January, 2019 - RESOURCES AND SERVICES TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE D...

**Resolved**All affected services should now be back online. Please report any i...

**RESOLVED**: Engineering IT ticket submission communication system intermittent...

**Notice**: Disruption to Engineering FastX Service - Wednesday, October 10, 201...

**ALERT**: Multiple Phishing ScamsGreetings,Who: Engineering faculty, instructor...

**Notice**: Disruption to Some Research Storage and Administrative Applications,...

**Notice** Network Outage in Everitt, Wednesday evening, June 20, 2018Power work...

**NOTICE** Engineering Print Service Migration: Wednesday, May 30 2018Who:Primar...

**NOTICE** Multiple servers unavailable – Critical maintenance Saturday Ma...

Resolved: Access to Some College of Engineering Departmental Websites Degraded, ...

Resolved WHAT: EWS home directories and class directories were unavailable to ...

RESOLVED What: CS Virtual Farm hosts and VMâ€™s hosted on their VSAN storage i...

Resolved: NFS home directories on Instructional Services Issue Thank you ...

Completed: Engineering GitLab Scheduled Maintenance Who: Engineering GitL...

Resolved: Virtual Machine Outage - PPSB Data CenterWho:Impact seems limited ...

Updated: New Support Ticket Creations via Email Delayed - FixedAudience: Engin...

Update: Zoom Outage - ResolvedTimeframe: 8:15 a.m. - 10 a.m Monday, August 2...

Resolved Multiple virtual machines currently unavailable.Update: Affected VMs ...

Resolved Echo360 Outage - National ImpactWho: Instructors and Students with ...

UPDATE: Engineering IT Help Ticketing Service - ResolvedTimeframe: 3 p.m. Fr...

UPDATE: FastX - Outage - ResolvedTimeframe: 9:00 p.m. Friday, April 3, 2020 ...

NOTICE:Student Home Directories - Storage Limitations, Quota ReachedWho: Stude...

Update: Student Home Directories Maintenance CompleteThe Student Home Director...

Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage Timeframe: Friday, January 10that ...

Notice: Student Home Directories Will Be Unavailable During MaintenanceService...

Completed: Citrix Maintenance – OutageTimeframe: Wednesday, August 21s...

Notice: Citrix Maintenance – Outage Timeframe: Wednesday, August 21sta...

ALERT: DOCUSIGN Phishing MessageWho: Engineering Faculty, Instructors, Staff, ...

RESOLVED EWS Linux Home Directories UnavailableWho: Engineering Students and...

RESOLVED Engineering Administrative File System UnavailableWho: Engineering ...

RESOLVEDcPanel OutageWHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:cPanel...

ALERT cPanel Outage6/9/2019WHO:College of Engineering Faculty and StaffWHAT:...

ALERT Ongoing Email Spoofing Attack 4/28/2019Greetings. This message is bein...

RESOLVED EWS Home directories and EWS Class directories unavailable 26 Apr 2...

NOTICE - Unavailabilty of serveral research servers, Physics and MRL home di...

NOTICE - 30 January, 2019 - RESOURCES AND SERVICES TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE D...

ResolvedAll affected services should now be back online. Please report any i...

RESOLVED: Engineering IT ticket submission communication system intermittent...

Notice: Disruption to Engineering FastX Service - Wednesday, October 10, 201...

ALERT: Multiple Phishing ScamsGreetings,Who: Engineering faculty, instructor...

Notice: Disruption to Some Research Storage and Administrative Applications,...

Notice Network Outage in Everitt, Wednesday evening, June 20, 2018Power work...

NOTICE Engineering Print Service Migration: Wednesday, May 30 2018Who:Primar...

NOTICE Multiple servers unavailable – Critical maintenance Saturday Ma...

NOTICE Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned System Maintenance at MRL, Sa...

SUBJECT: NOTICE: Campus Network Maintenance - Brief Network Disruptions Acro...

Subject: ALERT: Critical Vulnerability in CPU's and Multiple Operating S...

NOTICE Multiple Services Unavailable - Planned Network and System Maintenanc...

Reminder: Required Windows Updates Will be Pushed Out Starting Friday, 9/8/201...

ALERT: Mulitiple Phishing ScamsGreetings,Who: Engineering faculty, instructo...

Virus Alert: WannaCry Ransomware Hitting Windows Platform The WannaCry Ranso...