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March 14, 2016

Today's topics:

Second Test of CLASSE Computer Quick Notification System

  • CLASSE IT has been working on a system to quickly notify users of CLASSE Managed Computers of computing outages when e-mail is down for various reasons. The previous test identified some issues that we believe are now improved or resolved in our system.
  • So that CLASSE users are aware of what such a notification is, and what it looks like, as well as to test the full notification system, we will be undertaking a second test during our Tuesday down, between 10AM and Noon on Tuesday March 15th, 2016. You will receive between 1 and 4 notifications that say "CLASSE Quick Notification System: Test Message #" where # is 1 through 4. Some numbers may be skipped if there are issues, or if everything works as expected.
  • The notification will be a pop-up window with text and an OK button. It may also be a text based notification on your open terminals on Scientific Linux. When there are text messages, your window manager may notify you of a "Bell in Terminal / Shell" for each open terminal window.

LNX201 Reboot at 10am Tuesday 3/15

LNX201 will reboot for routine maintenance at approximately 10am Tuesday, 3/15. This general maintenance is required to clear stale processes and file handles, and is necessary to pick up an updated kernel.

Please close your work and logout of lnx201 before 10am Tuesday, and email service-classe@cornell.edu with any questions or concerns.

SSH Timeout from Red Rover

After a CIT firewall update on Wednesday 3/9, all connections through CIT's firewalls are dropped silently after 5 minutes of inactivity. This will impact anyone on Red Rover or some other Cornell networks, but will not impact most connections from offsite to CLASSE or from CLASSE to offsite (for example, home).

If you find your ssh connections dropping prematurely, you can extend your timeout to 50 minutes (for example) by adding the following to your ssh config file (either ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config):
Host *
  ServerAliveInterval 300
  ServerAliveCountMax 10

Linux Adobe Flash Firefox Plugin Security update on Tuesday 15-Mar-2016

Web Server Restarts - 10am Tuesday 3/15

At 10am Tuesday, several CLASSE web servers will be restarted. This should not be noticeable and will only result in a few second (at most) downtime for each server. This is necessary to improve the security of our web server configuration. The following servers will be affected: xraise, chesswww, cesrwww, wiki, www, pydio, wwwdev, netmon, userdb, indico.



General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.


Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:


This topic: Computing > Computing/CmpGrp > CmpgrpLinks > NewsLetter > NewsletterMarch142016
Topic revision: 14 Mar 2016, WilliamBrangan
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