Machine room power outage, May 19, 2007

Hi, folks.We’ve known this might be a possibility but the dates and times have just ben nailed down, so it’s time to announce it.The electrical power for Building 221 will be shut off on Saturday, May 19, 2007 while the substation for the building undergoes maintenance. Work is scheduled to begin at 6 AM and last for at least 8 hours. As a result, all computing systems in the building, except those with backup power, will be shutdown starting at 5:00 AM CDT and remain off until 2:00 PM CDT or until the work is complete. In order to take full advantage of this, we’re going to perform some maintenance as well. As such, there will be outages across the entire infrastructure during this period.We will attempt to minimize the length of any outages as much as we can, but users should expect that any service disruption on that day, including name servers, time servers, file servers, web servers and e-mail services is a known and planned event. No incoming mail will be lost during this time, simply delayed. We will endeavor to have http://www.mcs.anl.gov display a notice during the downtime.We’ll send out a reminder on this as the time approaches. I’ll also post updates to http://www.mcs.anl.gov/systems/blog as plans solidify further.Sorry for any inconvenience.