Dear Colleagues,
Every year we take a brief period during the Holiday Break to perform needed maintenance and upgrade of our infrastructure and core systems. Below is a description of what we are planning for December 20th,21st, 22nd and 23rd, and how it may impact you.
- Exchange email environment will be upgraded from version 2010 to 2013
- The new 2013 cluster is already built and integrated together with our 2010 cluster.
- We will migrate student mailboxes beginning Wednesday, Dec 17th through Friday, Dec 19th. Faculty & Staff mailboxes will migrate beginning Saturday, December 20th through Sunday, December 21st.
- Once all of the Outlook accounts have been migrated, you will see two or more restart messages. If you have access to multiple mailboxes, you will see more restart messages. Except for that, we do not anticipate any other impact for you.
- The interface for webmail will be changed, with an updated design that is reflective of the Outlook 2013 interface.
- We have identified an issue that relates to the existence of both Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2010 servers that affected relatively small percentage of mailboxes, however many of them belonging to Faculty. These mailboxes were not accessible for much of Monday, Dec 16th, to resolve this problem, these mailboxes have been migrated to Exchange 2013 ahead of schedule. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this cause these individuals during this transition.
- PaperCut printing management service will be upgraded on Sunday, Dec 21st between 8 am and Noon. There will be several short printing service interruptions during this window.
- Wireless Infrastructure Upgrade on Monday, Dec 22nd between 9 and 11 am.
o During this upgrade all wireless access points on campus will be rebooted, resulting in up to 15 minutes of wireless connectivity downtime throughout the campus, Bread Loaf and the Snowbowl.
- Middlebury core network routing changes on Tuesday, Dec 23rd
o We will be adjusting parts of our core network and routing between 8 AM and Noon. There will be 30-45 minutes of network service interruptions to McCardell Bicentennial Hall and separately, 30-45 minutes of network service interruption to residence halls on the North side of campus.
- Internet related outages – starting at 2pm on Tuesday, Dec 23rd
o Beginning at 2pm, we will be testing Internet and network component failover procedures. We expect there will be 3 to 5 interruptions of Internet connectivity to and from the Middlebury network, each lasting about 5 minutes.
Thank you for your patience and support as we perform these necessary upgrades,
Billy Sneed
ITS – Central Systems & Network Services
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753