Dispatches From The Geeks

The 221 MCS Machine Room will have a power outage on Saturday, September 22, 2007 to install new power feeds for arriving equipment. The outage window is from 5:30AM until 6PM, and all core services are expected to be down during this time.Sorry for the abrupt notice on this, we just learned recently that it was necessary on an accelerated schedule, and just learned very recently that the date was set. We also apologize for any inconvenience — the timing of this outage is not optimal for the Systems group either, but it needs to happen on this date for some machine arrivals that are happening the following week.We’re going to take the opportunity to move some machines into our new Tier One Service rack (which will allow machines to survive outages like this without any downtime in the future), as well as rebuild a number of servers to a more recent distribution with up-to-date kernels and software packages.You should expect all services, including e-mail to be down. (We won’t lose any e-mail — it will simply have a delayed delivery.) It would be best if you didn’t try to use any MCS services during the downtime, since any machine that’s up could be turned off unexpectedly, or could lose a connection to a vital server without warning. We’ll send an all-clear message when things are back, but to play it safe assume nothing will work correctly until 6PM.Please let me know if you have any concerns. Thanks![UPDATE: Time changed to 5:30 AM]