TCS Power Outage, June 1, 2015

As building 240 tenants know, there is major power work scheduled for June 1st that will take out power to the entire building. This, unfortunately, includes the data center in building 240, home to a number of computers. The administrators of specific systems (LCRC, Beagle, Magellan, etc.) will be notifying their users of what this means for them, but this announcement is a broader announcement of the general MCS and CELS computing infratructure and what will be affected.
The short answer is that it’s easier to say what won’t be affected. Mail services we provide (forwarding for mcs.anl.gov, alcf.anl.gov, cels.anl.gov, ci.uchicago.edu, etc.) and their mailing lists will be unaffected. Most web sites we host (WordPress, Confluence, etc.) will remain up. We’ll notify site owners of any exceptions to this. CIS-provided services (e-mail, web, business systems) are generally unaffected. Externally hosted services (Box, Dayforce, TAMS) are unaffected.
Now for the info you really need — what will be down. All MCS/CELS file and compute servers will be down. This includes SSH logins (login.mcs.anl.gov), unix and Mac home file servers, linux compute servers, all desktops, and all networking in building 240.
The outage window for the power work is slated to be 7AM to 7PM on Monday, June 1. As such, we will begin taking systems down prior to that so they shut down cleanly. You can expect MCS/CELS compute systems to be down beginning by 6AM on that day. Once the power comes back on, most of our systems should come back fairly quickly, and we hope to be back to normal well within that outage window, though we are beholden to the power work being completed before we can start bringing things back.
Because your network files will not be available, we encourage you to make sure you have files and data you need locally for that day. Getting accustomed to working in Box can help with that. We’ll be contacting administrative users in the lead-up to this outage to assist in getting you comfortable working with Box and getting your files moved there. You can find more information at http://inside.anl.gov/services/box.
We’ll send more announcements on this as we get closer to the date. You can also keep up to date via twitter (@mcssys) or WordPress (http://mcssys.wordpress.com).
Thanks!