OIT SysCore

The syscore wiki, 'http://www.umbc.edu/oit/iss/syscore/wiki/', has been upgraded to mediawiki version 1.5.5 from 1.5.0. This was a security update, so there shouldn't be any noticeable changes. If you notice anything broken, please let me know.

Jason

I'm happy to report that the second AFS RAID array was installed onto the SAN in the PUP building and now all of UMBC's user home directories, email storage, and most of the UMBC web content is mirrored across two buildings. This is a huge step for data survivability.

I also installed two new Sun StorEdge 3511 arrays onto the SAN, one in ECS and the other in PUP. Like the AFS RAID arrays, these two will provide mirrored redundancy for Blackboard, Oracle, and MySQL data. The Blackboard servers are on the SAN, too, and next week that stuff will be moved onto those disks.

To come: Research storage arrays will be added to the SAN as well. These will provide several terabytes of storage purely for research projects being conducted on various UMBC clusters as well as hercules and titan. This storage will be served out via NFS to those requiring it.

I've been in the process for the past week or so rearchitecting and installing a comletely new mail delivery, relay, and filtering system here at UMBC. The existing system, while flexible, had a lot of unnecessary overhead, had become hard to maintain, and wasn't up to the task of handling our current email load in a timely manner.

The new system was put into service during Thursday and Friday of last week, and with the exception of some very minor configuration problems, has been working flawlessly.

Blackboard was Down 8 p.m. on 1/24 to 10 a.m. on 1/25
for a hardware upgrade that improved performance for the traditionally busier Spring semester, the UMBC Blackboard server was down from 8 p.m. Tuesday, January 24, to 10 a.m. Wednesday, January 25. This did not affect Winter Blackboard courses which were running on a separate Blackboard server.

OIT uprading(sic... really upgraded but we also upRAIDed our storage to a raid 50) the Blackboard application database environment to complement the Jan. 13 software upgrade. We had hoped to complete both upgrades on the 13th, but delays in receiving the hardware, configuring and adequately testing it required a second downtime before Spring classes start.

We're in the process of upgrading our ''ifs'' AFS fileservers with the hardware that used to make up HFS8 & HFS9. These are Dell 2650 servers with direct-attached PowerVault arrays.

This upgrade moves us away from the home-built Kingston drive arrays that have been used in the past, doubles our IFS storage capacity, and moves to a faster hardware platform. (the old IFS servers consisted of 2 sun Netra T1 machines, and a home-built Linux box)

The new "ifs2" is currently online, and we're bringing online the new "ifs1" online right now as "ifs5".

We've moved the following servers to the Public Policy datacenter:

* webauth3.umbc.edu
* ifs2.afs.umbc.edu
* kerberos2.umbc.edu
* db3.afs.umbc.edu
* ldap-rep2.umbc.edu (will be an LDAP directory replica)

We have brought online a new www.umbc.edu server -- www3.umbc.edu -- to replace the www2.umbc.edu server (an old Sun E250). www3 is a Sun V210 that used to be milter4.umbc.edu, and is the same configuration as www1.umbc.edu.

This part of the www.umbc.edu loadbalanced cluster is housed in the Public Policy datacenter.