File and Mail Server Outage 7/4/07

As announced on Friday we will be migrating our shared filesystems from our old fileservers to a brand new faster and higher capacity system.The migration will make it necessary for the MCS workstations and servers to be taken offline on July 4th from 6am until Noon (CDT). To make the transition as smooth as possible we require that all users log out from their workstations at Close Of Business on July 3rd, and also to logout from all external connections before 6am of July 4th.  Please do not try to login during this period, even through the VPN.If you have any automated scripts or tasks (i.e. crontabs) that run during this period, please ensure they’re disabled.If everyone is able to comply, it will make the process go much more quickly.Any service outage during this period should be assumed to be expected and known.  Some web sites will be unavailable during this outage, however the MCS main web site should remain operational.A e-mail notice will be sent once the replacement has been copmpleted and external access has been restored.  If you normally check your mail from a unix machine, please use the web interface at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mail instead.Additionally the mail server will also be unavailable during a portion of this time for unrelated maintenance.  During the brief mail server downtime, mail will be delayed, but no mail should be prevented from ultimately arriving.Thank you again for your patience, we hope that after this inconvenience is over everyone will see a much better level of performance and reliability, and an overall happier experience for the division.