During the summer months, OIT does critical work to make sure everything is working well for our community. Much of this work involves updating our infrastructure components (network, servers, storage). In addition we perform various tests to validate our infrastructure operates as expected. All our redundant systems are tested also to make sure they perform as they were designed to provide no single point of failure.
Saturday, July 28th is our annual summer maintenance day. Between 5:45am and 9:45am there will be several network outages that will make most OIT services (from the Jesup Data Center) sporadically unavailable. During these 4 hours it is best to plan that NO OIT services will be available. Google applications (including email, calendar and drive) will not be affected during this maintenance, however if you are on campus your access to these services during this 4 hour period may be impacted periodically. Other cloud based services that use our campus authentication sources may be impacted during this window as well.
For the rest of the day, between 9:45am and 4:00pm, we will be updating some of the systems and networks that serve you and the campus. We do not anticipate that you will notice this work, but wanted to make you aware. To protect you and improve 911 service, we also will be visiting a small number of buildings to document phone locations and network mappings. OIT staff may need to enter some offices to verify this information. The buildings we plan on visiting are: Bascom, Hopkins, Hollander, Kellogg, Lasell, Mears, Miller, Paresky, TCL, TPL and Weston.
Prior to this maintenance day and for the few weeks after we will doing many things that may have shorter impacts on the community. We plan them as much as possible to occur and be completed prior to 7:30am or after 6:00pm. Any other work we do that will impact our services to you, we will notify those impacted directly and work with them to determine the best time to do the work.
Below is a detailed list of some of the things that we will be doing this summer:
Network
| Description | Service Disruption |
| Relocate redundant network infrastructure (border router, firewall and vpn appliance) | 7/2 – Possible short internet disruption |
| Campus Firewall upgrade and failover testing | July |
| Dorm ethernet deactivations – each year students must request ethernet activations, and each year we have to deactivate the ones we previously activated. | July-August |
| Wireless Controller software update | |
| Network Core switches Software update (point release) | Yes (<2 min) |
| Network Distrobution switches Software update (point release) | Yes (~7 min) |
| Remote VPN (LSF, Rosenberg, CDE at Williams Inn) software update (point release) | Yes (> 10 min) |
| VPN software update | No, not production |
| Border Router software update | Not anticipated |
| Service Block software update | July |
| Deploy new VPN | August |
| Retire legacy VPN and ASA | August-September |
| Data Center Network (updates) | July |
| Packetfence Upgrade | July-August |
| Edge Network (updates) – Configure new spanned VLANs | Not anticipated |
| Edge Network (updates) – Configure Packet Fence to handle new spanned VLANs | Not anticipated |
| Internet/Core Failure Testing | 7/28 |
| Solarwinds Migration | August |
| Clark Art fiber cut-over | June-July |
Server/Storage
| Description | Service Disruption |
| VMWare 6.7 upgrades (including VDI env) | July-August |
| TOR Switch FW upgrades and expansion Module | 7/28/2018 |
| Replace their Micros Registers with new models and a Micros Server Upgrade | June-July |
| Facility’s FM Systems configuration and installation | June-August |
| EMS RoomScheduler upgrade | |
| Retire\upgrade windows 2003\2008 servers | June-July |
| Financial Aid Physical DataMart env setup | July-August |
| DocFinity upgrade – test environment | July-August |
| OpenManage Enterprise for physical server management | July-August |
| Upgrade the teridici management appliance (VDI) | July-August |
| Decommission old M1000e enclosure | July |
| Windows\App Updates | Late July |
| EqualLogic Firmware Updates (Storage Arrays) | 7/28/2018 |
| Bios\FW Updates for Spec\Meltdown | July-August |
| Daily Messages program to retrieve and deliver the new DM HTML | June |
| Replace the NetScaler appliances | 7/28/2018 |
| DocFinity test infrastructure | July-August |
| Possible PaperCut upgrade | July-August |