This Sunday morning during our established maintenance window from 6 to 10 am we will performing the following activities:

(1)    We will be testing our firewall high availability failover functionality as well as adding new interfaces to these devices.  There may be brief (less than a minute) interruptions of Internet connectivity between 6 and 7 am.  Note, an Internet connectivity interruption would include the VPN connections to Banner and MIIS.

(2)    We will be upgrading network infrastructure in Munford, a residential hall, that will also affect Meeker and the Self-Reliance house.  We expect an interruption of network services for approximately 15 minutes between 6:30 and 9:00 am.

(3)    We will be upgrading network infrastructure in the Marble Works, that will also affect the Stone Mill.  We expect an interruption of network services for approximately 15 minutes between 7 and 9 am.

Between 7 and 8 am we will be applying a maintenance patch to our redundant pairs of dns and dhcp servers at Middlebury and at MIIS.  We do not expect any interruption of service.

Also between 7 and 8 am we will be adjusting the system resource settings for the web servers of our primary web sites (www.middlebury.edu, www.miis.edu).  We do not expect any interruption of service.

This Sunday morning during our established maintenance window of 6 to 10 am we will be performing the following tasks:

(1)    Between 6:45 and 7:45 am we will be testing the failover components of our high-availability border firewalls, we do not expect an interruption of service, however if we experience unexpected behavior, it is possible that there will be several short (less than a minute) interruptions of Internet connectivity.

(2)    Between 7:30 and 9:30 am we will be replacing network infrastructure that services the student residential halls Munford, Meeker and the Self-reliance building.

(3)    Between 7:30 and 9:30 am we will be replacing network infrastructure that services offices in the Marble works.

We appreciate your patience as we strive to keep our systems and network operating optimally.

One additional planned maintenance operation is now scheduled for Sunday morning at approximately 8:00 am.  We will upgrading the Library eproxy service.  This will result in less than a 15 minute interruption of access to e-books, e-journals and searchable Library databases that are restricted to Middlebury Students, Faculty and Staff, those listed with a red lock icon on the Databases A-Z list listed here:  http://sp.middlebury.edu/subjects/databases.php.

This Sunday during our established maintenance window between 6 and 10 am we will be performing maintenance on several systems that will result in service interruptions.

Between 6 and 7 am there may be 2-4 short (less than 1 minute) Internet connectivity interruptions as enhancements are made to the operations of our border gateway routers and we dual home network switches in the path between our network core and upstream Internet service providers to provide additional redundancy.

We will be relocating one of the network appliances that establish the VPN (virtual private network) tunnel with the Ellucian Data Center that host our Banner systems.  As the VPN appliances are redundant, the VPN should not drop but we are performing this during our maintenance window to minimize the impact should an unexpected service interruption take place.

We will be upgrading our PaperCut system between 7 and 9 am.  During this period individual print servers that include Willow, Spruce, Bombay, Aspen, Beach and Walnut will be upgrade and will require a service interruption of approximately 10 minutes each.  Additionally, there will be about a 10 minute interruption to the web print service.  Individual print release stations will each need to be restarted as part of this process.  Any print jobs submitted to the print services will be queued up and will print once all of services are restored to normal operations.

We will upgrading the server infrastructure that hosts Concerto, a digital assets management system (https://concerto.middlebury.edu), between 9 and 9:30 am and expect a service interruption of approximately 10 minutes.

As always we appreciate your patience as perform essential systems and network maintenance and strive to keep services interruptions to a minimum.

Best regards,

Jim

Also at approximately 7:00 am this Sunday morning we will be rebooting our Library catalog server, this will result in downtime for about 5 minutes of Middcat, My Middcat, Ilsley Library catalog, Sheldon Museum catalog as the use of the Millennium client (circulation, acquisition, cataloging) by Library staff.

This Sunday at approximately 7:00 am we will upgrade the resources for the web server that hosts go.middlebury.edu.  This upgrade will require approximately 5 minutes of downtime go.middlebury.edu.