Technology Update

October 20, 2006

Scheduled 'fortress' upgrade and expansion outage

FYI

ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT
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You have received this letter because you have an account on Purdue's DXUL archival storage system, which is sometimes referred to as "UniTree" or "fortress".

As part of a major upgrade and expansion, the DXUL system will be out of service from 8am Saturday, October 28, until approximately 6pm Sunday, October 29. During this time, staff in ITaP's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) will

* transfer the DXUL internal databases from fortress.cc.purdue.edu to a new server which will be called fortress.rcac.purdue.edu;

* convert these databases to be compatible with a newer version of the DXUL storage-management software that will be used on the new server;

* disable access to the old fortress.cc.purdue.edu DXUL server;

* enable access to the new fortress.rcac.purdue.edu DXUL server.

During this process, all access to DXUL will be unavailable. In particular, DXUL users will not be able to

* access DXUL directories via /archive/fortress/home and NFS;

* access fortress.cc.purdue.edu via ftp, sftp, rsh, rlogin, ssh, or slogin;

* access DXUL directories as mapped network drives or via SMB/Samba.

At the completion of this process,

* the DXUL storage-management software will be upgraded to version 2.9;

* the DXUL server will be a multi-processor IBM system with 2.5 TB of disk cache and four GigE network connection;

* the DXUL system's tape robot will be upgraded from its current 50TB capacity to a capacity of more than 1 PB.

Please note that after this upgrade, access to the DXUL system via sftp/ftp, slogin/rlogin, mapped network drives, SMB, etc must be made via the new fortress.rcac.purdue.edu hostname -- access via the old fortress.cc.purdue.edu hostname will no longer be available.

If you are a system administrator who makes DXUL available to users of your systems via NFS, please contact dxul-help@purdue.edu for information about the changes you'll need to make to provide DXUL access after this upgrade. All other questions about this upgrade should be referred to rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Bill Whitson
Rosen Center for Advanced Computing
ITaP

Chris Edwards
Computer Support Manager