Central Web Services

Primary Contact: Josh Zojonc, josh.zojonc@oregonstate.edu

On Saturday the 30th @10pm we will be upgrading our Netscaler load balancers from version 9.3 to version 10.0. We will be following the Citrix documentation on how to do this. The appliances will be upgraded one at a time and no downtime or outages are expected. This change will be invisible to users. In the event of any problems we will roll the changes back following Citrix documentation.

General Communication is via: http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/sig/2013/03/26/netscaler-upgrade-to-version-10/ I will be communicating with those that are able to log into the Netscaler on an individual basis.

We will be making two wireless network changes at around 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday 26th March 2013. Both have been tested under realistic load, in the Memorial Union. Neither seemed to disrupt service.

The OSU_Secure wireless network change will be the more noticeable of the two changes. It will result in OSU_Secure users receiving new I.P. addresses (see below for the details).

On campus view:

Off campus view:-

128.193.152.160 through 128.193.152.174

If you maintain an on-campus firewall (or access control list), that allows users of the OSU_Secure wireless network to get inside, you will have to update it with the new (on-campus) address ranges. If you collaborate with an outside organization, and they have allow users of the OSU_Secure wireless network to connect through their firewall, they will have to update their firewall with the new (off-campus) address ranges. If you experience a problem connecting to a resource, after we make the change, please check your firewall/access-list first.

Ian R. Downie

MyDegrees has been returned to service.

Catherine

Catherine Williams Associate Director, Enterprise Computing Services Oregon State University 224B Milne Computer Center Corvallis OR 97331 541-737-2718

MyDegrees is currently unavailable. OSU staff members and the vendor are working on a solution.

Network Services will be performing maintenance on the ResNet networks (both wired and wireless service) on the morning of Thursday, March 28th between 5:30 and 6:30 am. The network in residence halls & cooperative houses will be down for most of the hour while we upgrade the router’s chassis and make a configuration change to resolve a performance issue they’re currently encountering.

Tony Brock
Network Services, Engineering Team

Correction – Date was a month off. Sorry.

On Thursday morning 3/21 at 8 AM CWS will be updating CWS Hosted Drupal 7 sites to the latest version of Drupal. This will only affect Drupal 7 production sites. Although this will incur a 2 to 3 minute interruption in service to the affected websites, most site visitors will not notice the interruption, as most pages are cached. This will be a rolling upgrade and we cannot say exactly when or on which day a specific site will be affected.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact us through our form at http://oregonstate.edu/is/services/cws/contact.

Thank you,

Paul Lieberman Lead Web Developer Central Web Services

On Thursday morning 2/21 at 8 AM CWS will be updating CWS Hosted Drupal 7 sites to the latest version of Drupal. This will only affect Drupal 7 production sites. Although this will incur a 2 to 3 minute interruption in service to the affected websites, most site visitors will not notice the interruption, as most pages are cached. This will be a rolling upgrade and we cannot say exactly when or on which day a specific site will be affected.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact us through our form at http://oregonstate.edu/is/services/cws/contact.

Thank you,

Paul Lieberman Lead Web Developer Central Web Services

I’ll be patching CN-Home, CN-Share, TSS-Data, TSS1, and TSS4 on Saturday, March 16 during are maintenance window starting at 10 PM. Barring any unforeseen problems, patching should be complete within one hour.

Bruce Beicke Systems Administrator 541-713-3551 bruce.beicke@oregonstate.edu

Banner will be unavailable at midnight this Friday, March 9th, for our usual backups. Banner generally returns to service around 5:00am on Saturday morning. This Saturday, March 16th, Banner will remain unavailable for four more hours, and return to service at 9:00am.

Jill

Jill Swenson Associate Director, Enterprise Computing Services Oregon State University

Banner will be unavailable at midnight this Friday, March 9th, for our usual backups. Banner generally returns to service around 5:00am on Saturday morning. This Saturday, March 9th, Banner will remain unavailable for three more hours, and return to service at 8:00am.

Jill

Jill Swenson Associate Director, Enterprise Computing Services Oregon State University

Primary Contact: Jill Swenson, jill.swenson@oregonstate.edu

We will extend the Banner backup period on Saturday March 9 and Saturday March 16 to 8:00AM to load tables into the Operational Data Store. This is a well tested known activity that needs to be performed when the database is relatively quiet since it involves a number of table locks and creates moderate system load.

Email has been sent to the Banner technical teams, and business calendars have been checked to confirm that this will not disrupt planned business activities.

Starting at 03/05/2013 – 3:15am – 3:27am, an incident occurred with Core Network. This incident is currently resolved.

At approximately 3:15am today (3/5) many OSU network services became unavailable. The issue resolved itself by 3:27am. We are still investigating the cause of this outage.

Customers using mail.oregonstate.edu to send mail from off-campus computers may have had problems sending between 1:36PM and 3:32PM today. Some customers reported seeing an error from their email client about TLS not being supported by the server.

This issue was due to an incorrect configuration change that was made to try to resolve today’s issue with mail sent from OSU web forms.

We apologize for this disruption in service and will review our processes for incident management to prevent future such issues.

>From roughly 12:00 am on Sunday, March 3rd through 3:45 pm on Monday, March 4th, email sent from OSU websites was being queued on our webheads server but not delivered. This issue has been resolved and the queued email is now being sent to their intended recipients. No email should have been lost. Please note that email sent in the standard fashion via mail clients (Outlook, ONID webmail, Gmail, etc) was not affected – the issue was limited to forms hosted on OSU websites that send email, such as customer contact forms.

The proximate cause of the issue is the firewall upgrade completed on Saturday night, March 2nd. Information Services is investigating the root cause of the issue. We apologize for the service interruption.

Due to an unannounced change made by the vendor that hosts OSU’s MediaSpace service, some MediaSpace videos embedded into external websites were unavailable between Thursday 2/28 and Monday morning 3/4. Video playback was not affected at all at the http://media.oregonstate.edu website. The issue has been resolved and all embedded videos are again accessible, and following a conference call on the morning of March 4, the host is reviewing their change processes. We apologize for any service interruption you or your audience might have experienced.

The Netsvcs firewall migration scheduled for today at 10PM is complete, and all services are functioning normally.

Most services behind the firewall were disrupted for less than 5 minutes. There were problems with authentication to OSU_Secure until about 10:45PM, when one of the authentication servers was rebooted.

If you notice any issues, please contact us via email to net@oregonstate.edu.

-Kirsten Petersen Network Services Oregon State University

From 9 AM to 9:30 AM Sunday, the Exchange system will undergo maintenance related to the Outlook client delayed message issue experienced on 2/28. This is not an outage and will not adversely affect access to email during this timeframe.

Banner will be unavailable at midnight this Friday, March 1st, for our usual backups. Banner generally returns to service around 5:00am on Saturday morning. This Saturday, March 2nd, Banner will remain unavailable for three more hours, and return to service at 8:00am.

Network Services will perform a firewall upgrade on Saturday, March 2nd between 10:00 pm and 10:15 pm. This upgrade will allow OSU to continue building a more secure and redundant computing environment. Please be aware of the service impacts and the steps you can take to avoid being impacted.

• Email – Delivery Delayed. No messages will be lost, only queued. Delivery should resume by 10:15 pm.
• VPN & Wireless Network – Authentication. You will not be able to make a new connection to the OSU wireless network during this time (OSU_Secure, OSU_Access, ResNet) or to VPN.  If you establish a connection before 10:00, you should not experience a service interruption. Standard ethernet-based (wired) connections on campus will not be affected at all.
• Lync & SharePoint will be completely unavailable during the upgrade.

Should problems occur, there is a chance that the above services will be interrupted longer than expected, in which case we will roll back changes, revert to the firewall currently in production, and reestablish the above services by 10:45 pm at the latest.

Departmental Computer Administrators (DCAs) across OSU were alerted last week that they will need to mitigate any potential DNS issues regarding their systems.

Primary Contact: Jill Swenson, jill.swenson@oregonstate.edu

Blackboard Mobile Learn (a mobile interface to Blackboard Learn) will be activated on the Blackboard servers at 7:00AM on Thursday March 28, 2013. This is a configuration change to Blackboard which enables mobile clients to access the mobile-specific interface. The feature has been preconfigured and tested in our development environment. Activation involves clicking on “Activate” and, if significant problems arise, the feature can be easily turned off. The helpdesk and TAC are aware of this change and will be involved in communication and pilot tests.