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.

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.