IT News You Can Use - December 22

Did You Know?

ETS Client Services has a new service desk location in room 244 Hitchcock Hall for in person service for our customers.  This is in the former EED department office.  The new location is staffed on regular business days 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., as is our location in 1012 Smith Lab. 

Happy Holidays from ETS!

Upcoming Work

• Wednesday, December 21 at 10:00 P.M., ETS will start the process of updates to all COE Linux systems managed by ETS. Please make sure that any Linux system you or your group uses is powered on at that time. The process runs overnight, and while the updates themselves should not cause interruptions, we recommend that you save any open documents before the update process beings. On Thursday, December 22 at 7:15 A.M., ETS will begin rebooting these systems. Please save all of your work and logoff before the reboots begin to avoid losing any unsaved work. Reboot processes will run through 9:00 A.M. If after that time you encounter any issues with a Linux system, please submit an ETS ticket at go.osu.edu/ets. In the ticket description, please note that it is a Linux system and include both the hostname and its location.

• Thursday, December 22 at 5:00 P.M., ETS will be rebooting some building network equipment as the last step of some required maintenance. During that time, networks may be down for several minutes as the system come back up. Affected locations:

• 930 Kinnear Road – 2^nd floor and rear building
• Baker Systems – 5^th floor
• Bolz Hall – 4^th floor
• DSA Snow Removal Building
• ESL
• NRL
• Pomerene – College of Engineering spaces only
• Scott Labs – 2^nd floor of East building
• Smith Labs – 5^th floor

Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Beginning Thursday, December 22 at 9:00 P.M. and lasting approximately 4 hours, ETS will be updating the Pulse VPN. Existing connections will be terminated, and the service will be unavailable during the update. This means there will be no remote connectivity into the College of Engineering networks during the update.

Please note there will be a subsequent client update for the software that runs on your computers. This update will be triggered the next time you connect to the VPN server. As part of the update, the software is being rebranded. What was formerly labeled as Pulse will now be called Ivanti. Please see the Pulse VPN help article for examples of the new visual appearance.

• Thursday, December 29 from 7:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M., ECE users will be affected by an outage of all ECE Linux login servers. Once the work in the data center is complete the servers will be patched and booted up.

• Tuesday, January 3 at 11:30 P.M. and lasting about an hour, ETS will be upgrading storage server software. This update only affects data shares (S:\ drive). There is a small risk of storage connections experiencing brief pauses in service during the upgrade. Storage transactions interrupted by these pauses will resume normally after a short period of time.

• Between Wednesday, January 4 at 11:00 P.M. and Thursday, January 5 at 3:00 A.M., ETS will be performing core network maintenance. During this period there may be brief interruptions to all ETS networks. This will include all Engineering buildings on main campus, west campus, TRC and the Airport. It may also affect inbound services such as the Pulse VPN and other remote connections. Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Between 11:00 P.M. Thursday, January 5 and 2:00 A.M. Friday, January 6, ETS will be performing core network maintenance. During this period there may be intermittent network outages to central services including storage (S:\ and U:\ drives) and Citrix connectivity.  Wireless networks are not affected by this work.