Pangea will be down December 28, 2007.
No IT support December 22, 2007 through January 2, 2008.
Last revision December 19, 2007
Stanford University will be closed December 22, 2007 through January 2, 2008. In general, there will be no information technology services or support available in the School of Earth Sciences during that period.
- No desktop support available via HelpSU
- No support for pangea, School network, or computer clusters
- No electrical power in Mitchell all day Thursday, December 27, 2007
- Pangea will be DOWN all day Friday, December 28, 2007 for maintenance
- Save energy and protect computers from hackers - turn them off!
See detailed information below on these topics.
No desktop computer support during winter closure, December 22, 2007 through January 2, 2008
During the University's winter closure period, from December 22, 2007 through January 2, 2008, inclusive, normal computer support services will not be available, either from School of Earth Sciences personnel or ITS. The ITS Help Desk (650-725-HELP) will be monitored, but only reports of major problems will be passed to ITS on-call personnel, for example, major network outages. Problems with specific computers will not be addressed until January 3, 2007. See this web page for more information about ITS support during the closure.
There may be a backlog of HelpSU requests during the first week of January, so please be patient if you need help immediately after the closure.
No support for pangea, the School network, or computer clusters
Pangea and the School of Earth Sciences network will be left running for remote access, except pangea will be down for maintenance on December 28, 2007, and the entire Mitchell Earth Sciences building network will be down on December 27, 2007, due to a scheduled power outage.
Because no School IT staff will be working, there will be no disk backups on pangea during the break. Report pangea problems to the system manager and network problems to the network administrator. Reports will likely not be addressed until work resumes on January 3, 2008.
The A65 and GRID lab computers will be available, but please shut them down completely (and turn off power to the monitor) after using them to save energy! Report problems to the A65 lab manager or the GRID lab manager. Reports will not be addressed until January 3, 2008.
The A65 lab will be completely closed to all users on Thursday and Friday, January 3-4, 2008, so the PCs can be prepared for Winter Quarter courses. All user data on the a65 pcs will be erased on January 3, 2008. If you have left any files on those PCs, get them off before January 3!
Electrical power outage in Mitchell Earth Sciences Building Thursday, December 27, 2007
Electrical power to the Mitchell building will be out from 7 am to 7 pm on Thursday, December 27, 2007, so the main building breakers can be replaced.
This means, of course, that no computers will function in Mitchell and also that the computer network in Mitchell will be unavailable.
Mitchell residents: shutdown your computers before leaving for the break! Otherwise, the sudden loss of power on December 27, 2007, may cause disk file corruption.
Pangea server unavailable on Friday, December 28, 2007
The pangea server will be down all day Friday, December 28, 2007, for annual system hardware and software maintenance tasks. It will go down about 9 a.m. and come back online by 5 p.m. The following services provided by pangea will be unavailable while pangea is down on December 28.
- School web pages and online databases
- Email forwarding from old pangea addresses (messages will be deferred, not lost)
- Campus-wide license server for ARCGIS
- The GRID lab large-format plotters and the A65 cluster printers
- General print queuing by pangea for workstations and PCs
- File service to workstations, PCs, and Macintoshes from pangea, including home directories and special group shares, for example, GESadmin and the Branner Library GIS share
- Anonymous ftp server
- File transfers via sftp, scp, etc. to/from pangea (for example, Dreamweaver web page uploads)
- Command line or X-window logins to pangea to run programs
The Earth Sciences computer network is not affected by pangea outages.
Conserve electricity and protect computers during the break
Please, when you leave on December 21, 2007, for the winter closure, remember to turn off all lights and electrical devices in your offices and labs to save energy. Shutdown your computer, too! The "sleep" mode saves some energy, but a complete shutdown and power off saves much more.
In addition, if your computer is off, it is protected against hacker attacks. Some people have left their computers on while on vacation, only to find that hackers broke in because there was no one there to monitor the system or click "Yes" to install protective software updates as they became available. Also, turning off your computer will protect it from any possible power fluctuations or spikes.