This Sunday during our established maintenance window between 6 am and 10 am we will be performing the following maintenance activities:

(1)    As part of our continued network redundancy improvements we will be dual homing critical network aggregation switches that provide connectivity to Bicentennial Hall and the residential halls on the north side of campus.  While we do not expect any service interruptions, there is the possibility of loss of network connectivity for the affected buildings for less than 5 minutes.

(2)    Add an additional uplink module to a network switch in the Athletics facilities.  While we do not expect any service interruptions, there is the possibility of loss of network connectivity for only the Athletic offices for less than 5 minutes.

(3)    Add additional system resources to the web servers for the College’s primary web sites (www.middlebury.edu, www.miis.edu).  While we do not expect any service interruptions, it is possible the web sites will respond slower than normal while the individual web servers are upgraded.

We appreciate your patience as we upgrade our systems and network infrastructure.

As noted late on Tuesday we scheduled and then performed emergency network maintenance Wednesday morning at 7 am when we replaced one of the border gateway routers that connects us to one of our two Internet Service Providers.  This Sunday during our regular maintenance window at approximately 7:00 am EDT will be replacing the remaining border gateway router that connects us to our other Internet Service Provider.

We expect brief interruptions of Internet service as the new device is installed and network routing readjusts.

Thank you for your patience as we upgrade our infrastructure that provides additional capacity and functionality as well as mitigate the risk of unplanned service interruptions.

Billy Sneed joined the CSNS work group within LIS on July 9^th, 2012 as a senior network administrator.  Billy brings 14 years of experience in delivering high-end networking solutions, formally working for large Internet service providers including Fairpoint Communications in New Hampshire and Cox Communications in Florida.  Billy has a particular interest in enhancing the visibility of our network and has already installed and configured new monitoring tools that allow us to see historical bandwidth usage crossing the interfaces of our network core and aggregation switches that provide connectivity to individual building and server farms.  During our core upgrade project while we were operating on our “life boat”, Billy seized the opportunity to load various different versions of the network operating systems, run diagnostics and ensure that when we moved the new core to production we would be stable.

By moving here from Florida recently, Billy hasn’t yet experienced a Vermont winter – we keep telling him that he’ll need a winter coat, but he seems content with just a “hoodie” for now… Let’s check back with Billy in say January to see how that worked out for him…

Please join us in welcoming Billy to Middlebury, we’re delighted to have him on board.

Between 6 and 8 am EDT we will be upgrading the Middlebury College wireless infrastructure and expect that wireless services that include Midd-Secure, Midd-Standard and Midd-Unplugged will be interrupted at different times and for different locations throughout the campus for two brief periods of less than 10 minutes.  No changes will be required to your wi-fi clients to reconnect Middlebury’s wireless services once services have been restored.

Between 10 am and 11 am EDT we will be upgrading components of our Domain Name Service (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers on the Monterey campus and integrating them with their counter parts here on the Middlebury campus.  We expect at 15 minute interruption of DNS only for the miis.edu domain for individuals on the Middlebury and Monterey Campus (but not from off campus), thus during this 15 minute period, it may not be possible for you to visit web sites such as www.miis.edu or blogs.miis.edu (from computers on either campus).

We appreciate your patience as we continually upgrade our technology infrastructure.

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.