During our established maintenance window between 6 am and 10 am Sunday morning we will be upgrading two services, the Central Authentication Service (CAS) that is used to login to many Middlebury and MIIS web applications and Papercut used to track printing.

We will not be making any network infrastructure related changes this Sunday, the interim network core solution in place is working well and we are continuing to work with our vendors to isolate instability problems with new gear that is part of our network core upgrade, we will announce any planned network service interruption in advance.

Beginning at approximately 7:00 am we will start the papercut upgrade to version 12.3 that includes upgrades to our primary papercut server but also a number of secondary print servers including:  Willow, Spruce, Bombay, Aspen, Beech and Walnut.  The entire upgrade process is estimated to take 1.5 hours however the actual service interruption will be less than 10 minutes for any individual server.  When a particular server is off-line, printing jobs will be queued up and resubmitted once the server is backup.  There will also be a less than 10 minute outage of web print services during this window.

Beginning at approximately 8:00 am we will be upgrading CAS with new servers configured as an high availability (HA) pair, we do not expect a notable interruption of the web application authentication service as we will be redirecting incoming requests to the new servers while keeping the current ones functional, it is possible that  one may be asked to login a second time when authenticating to another web application for as long as 10 minutes during the actual upgrade.  CAS is used to log in to many Middlebury and MIIS web applications include the primary college web sites, the course hub, Moodle and sites.middlebury.edu.

We appreciate your patience as we upgrade our systems.

Best regards,

Jim

This Sunday morning during our established maintenance window between 6 and 10 am EDT we will be performing several key system and network component upgrades that will affect wired and wireless network connectivity.

We are increasing the network bandwidth of the links that connect the wireless network controllers with the core of the College network from 2 gbps to 10 gbps, this will improve the total capacity of our wireless infrastructure and provide for expected growth in the coming months.  As the wireless network controller links are upgraded, the individual wireless access points (WAPs) that are distributed throughout the campus may lose network connectivity for up to 15 minutes and thus wireless network services may be unavailable at various locations throughout the Middlebury and Bread Loaf campuses during our maintenance window for up to 15 minutes.

We are also upgrading key network switches that connect our network core to various devices in our path to our upstream Internet service providers, as these individuals switches are upgraded there likely will be multiple short interruptions (a few minutes) of Internet connectivity for all of the Middlebury and Bread Loaf campuses.

Finally we’ll be upgrading components within our VMWare infrastructure that support virtual desktops such as those used at “thin client” stations throughout the Davis Family Library and kiosk stations in various other locations such as those in or near the Grille, during our maintenance window there will be periods when a thin client station will not be able to startup a new virtual desktop session.

We appreciate your patience as we work to enhance our systems and network infrastructure.

This Sunday morning during our regular maintenance window between 6 am and 10 am we will upgrading our server appliances that provide Domain Name Service (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHPC) services.  DNS translates fully qualified hostnames such as www.middlebury.edu to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are the unique identifiers of computer systems on the Internet.  Our DHCP servers hand out IP addresses to client computers on the College’s network so that they can access network resources both at Middlebury and on the Internet generally.

Because our DNS and DHCP server appliances have redundancy and configured as a highly available service, we do not expect any interruption of service to the Middlebury community or the availability of our services such as our web sites or email systems to the Internet generally, however as a precaution we are performing this work during our established Sunday morning maintenance window.

Best Regards,

Jim

This Sunday morning during our established maintenance window between 6 am and 10 am we will be replacing critical network components that provide wired and wireless network services to Bread Loaf and the Snow Bowl.  The majority of the work will be taking place in the Library, the Inn and the Barn on the Bread Loaf campus; as a result, network services will be off-line for extended periods in these building during the maintenance window.  Additionally, we will be performing maintenance on the equipment that connects Bread Loaf and the Snow Bowl with the Middlebury campus; as a result there likely will be a multiple several minute network and Internet connectivity interruptions to all of Bread Loaf and the Snow Bowl during this maintenance window.

We appreciate your patience as we upgrade our network infrastructure and strive to keep our service operating optimally.

This Sunday between 6:30 and 9:00 am EDT we’re preforming maintenance work on approximately 90 systems that provide many technology services for the College, for a list of affected systems or any questions or concerns, please contact Jim Stuart at jstuart@middlebury.edu.

Thank you for your patience as we strive to keep our systems operating optimally.

This Sunday morning during our regular maintenance window there may be two very brief interruptions of connectivity to the internet between 8:00 am and 8:30 am as maintenance is performed on a critical network device.   We do not expect the interruptions to be noticeable, however in the worst case an interruption could last for as long as 2 minutes.

Thanks for your patience as we strive to keep our systems operating in an optimal state.

Best Regards,

Jim

This Sunday, during the morning downtime maintenance window
(8-10am), we will be upgrading the network equipment in Painter
House.   There will be interruptions of network service there (and
possibly briefly in 5 Court Street).