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Missouri S&T experienced a brief campus-wide network outage at 4:20 p.m. today. The outage was caused by a core router failure in the Computer Science data center.

IT will continue to investigate the root cause of the failure and will provide more information as it becomes available.

As a result of today's Next Generation Network upgrade, access to a small portion of user home directories (aka "S: drives") is unavailable. In addition, access to user and department web directories/volumes will be unavailable for approximately 18 hours.

Please note that user data was NOT affected and web sites being served from both user and department web directories/volumes are still available from the Internet. Only a user's ability to EDIT the aforementioned sites has been affected.

This interruption in access is necessary to restore proper directory permissions. For most users this service interruption will require no action at all. However, if you have set any custom permissions for accessing your S: drive, user web or department web directories, those permissions will need to be reset once service has been restored.

If you require assistance with resetting your permissions, please contact the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

Missouri S&T has been working with MOREnet to increase our campus bandwidth capacity and offer improved Internet performance by upgrading to an NGN (Next Generation Network).

Related to this upgrade, most IT services will be unavailable on Saturday, Nov. 8 from 8 a.m. to noon.  Customers should expect the following regarding campus computing services during this time:

• Email and voicemail will be unavailable (new messages will queue up for delivery, but customers will be unable to access existing messages during the outage)
• Network File Storage will be unavailable, including personal and department folders and web volumes
• Customers will not be able to login to CLC computers
• IT hosted servers will be unavailable
• IT applications hosted on itweb.mst.edu may not function correctly
• New systems or computers attempting to get access to the network will not be able to connect

For more information about this issue, please contact the IT Help Desk at 573-341-HELP or read the NGN announcement from MOREnet.

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 5:50 a.m.

As of 5:50 a.m. today, access to all network file storage has been restored.

IT teams worked through the night to identify several key factors which played a role yesterday's outage. At this time we are still working with the vendor to analyze the diagnostic information, to see if we can more clearly identify the exact cause. We will also be evaluating our ongoing operations of network file storage to identify changes, which may be needed to prevent this type of outage in the future.

IT would like to thank the campus community for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue. Should you experience additional problems related to network file storage or other technology related areas, please contact the Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 11:05 p.m.

IT teams continue to work through the night to coordinate a solution with multiple vendors to restore network file storage. Further communications will be forthcoming when service has been restored.

Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 4:40 p.m.

At noon today, an emergency maintenance outage was taken on all network file storage (Minerfiles service). See below for more details.

Working through the day, IT has been able to identify the underlying cause of the outage and is working with Microsoft to develop a procedure to correct the issue.

While the outage has been extended, the extension is partly a result of our efforts to safeguard everyone's data. We apologize for the extended nature of the outage and are working to correct the issue as quickly as possible. We will continue to work throughout the evening until service is restored.

Please stay tuned to IT Press (itpress.mst.edu) for the latest updates regarding this emergency maintenance event.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 11:50 a.m.

There will be an emergency maintenance outage of all network file storage (Minerfiles service), starting today at noon.

This outage will impact: user web volumes, user home directories (S: drives), CLC profiles, and departmental directories (Y:, P: drives, etc.).

Length of outage: Approximately 1 hour, but due to the nature of the issue being corrected, may take slightly longer. We are continuing to work to resolve this issue.  It is taking longer than anticipated due to unknown problems with one of the sub-systems involved.  We will continue to work with the vendor (Microsoft) to diagnose the issue, and will restore services as soon as possible.
 
IT has engaged the vendor, and is taking an outage now to prevent a longer, unscheduled outage from occurring in the future.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

What:  Important IT maintenance.  Everyone using a university-owned computer is asked to make sure their data is saved and log off their machine(s) before 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 3.

When: From 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 3 until noon on Saturday, Oct. 4

Why:    See explanation below.

Definition of terms:

• Roaming profile - A roaming profile is the stored data that allows customers to login to almost any computer on campus and still have access to My Documents folders, bookmarks and saved settings for computer software.

• Local profile - A local profile is the settings that are only stored on a single computer and do not follow you if you move to a computer elsewhere on campus.

What's involved in this update?
The current storage being used for roaming profiles is unable to meet the growing demand by our customers.  During this update, these roaming profiles will be moved to an improved storage technology with greater storage capacity.

How will this benefit me?
Many customers have experienced abnormally long login times when trying to login to computer labs, classroom computers and other machines on campus that are set up to use roaming profiles. Moving roaming profiles to a larger, more stable storage area will help alleviate this problem.

Help!  I'm running an important academic/administrative project on my computer and logging off would interrupt my work.
If you need to be logged into a campus computer during this outage, please contact the IT Help Desk at 573-341- HELP (4357) for further assistance.

To sum it all up
We've scheduled an outage to prevent potentially serious problems and help improve performance. Everyone using computers on campus is asked to log out during this outage.  We apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Access to campus network shared drives was restored as of 6 p.m. Friday.

The campus network shared drives, including departmental drives, are currently unavailable. You will not be able to access shared documents or save files to these drives until this issue is resolved. IT is working to correct the problem as quickly as possible and expects to have shared drives accessible again in approximately one hour (6 p.m.). If more time is needed, additional updates will be posted here on IT Press.

We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions about this issue, please contact the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

The IT Help Desk is currently experiencing problems with its automated telephone menu. If you call the Help Desk, you will most likely hear the KMST radio stream until one of our customer support representatives is available to take your call.

We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have our menu system up and running as soon as possible.

IT is performing maintenance this week related to the July 31 decommission of the umr.edu domain. If you are using a university-owned machine, please turn off your machine, wait 10 seconds and turn it back on. This needs to be done at your earliest convenience before Wednesday, July 30. You can immediately login again after turning your machine back on.

Please make sure that any students working in your offices and using university machines also do this as soon as it is convenient and before July 30.

Keep in mind that all umr.edu email and web addresses will no longer work after July 31. If you have questions about how to prepare for this transition, please visit our IT name change resource site.

Thank you for your assistance. If you have any questions or difficulty rebooting your machine, please call the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

The IT ticketing issues announced earlier have been resolved and help requests can now be submitted online. All tickets submitted in the past two days (Thursday and Friday) are now in our system and will be processed as soon as possible.

If you have any questions or feel your ticket was not received, please call the It Help Desk at 341-HELP (4357).

We are currently experiencing issues with our IT ticketing system and tickets submitted electronically are not being delivered to our customer service team.

If you submitted a ticket in the past 24 hours, please call the Help Desk to make sure that your service request was received. If you need assistance with a new issue, please call the Help Desk instead of submitting a ticket online until further notice.

IT is currently working with our outside vendor to find and implement a solution. Thank you for your patience as we work to fix this problem.