Dear Researchers,
The GT network team will undertake an emergency code upgrade on the departmental Palo Alto firewalls beginning at 8pm tonight. Because this is a high availability pair of devices, this upgrade should not be a major disruption to any traffic to or from the PACE systems. The specific upgrade has already been successfully accomplished on other firewall devices of the same hardware and software versions and it was observed to not cause any disruptions.
With that said, there is a possibility that connections to the PACE login servers may see a temporary interruption between 8pm and 11pm TONIGHT as the firewalls are upgraded. This should not impact any running jobs except if there is a request for a license on a license server elsewhere on campus (e.g., abaqus) that happens to coincide with the exact moment of the firewall changeover. Additionally, there is possibility that users may experience interruptions during their interactive sessions (e.g., edit session, screen, VNC Job, Jupyter notebook). The batch jobs that are already scheduled and/or running on the clusters should otherwise progress normally.
Please check the status and completion of your jobs that have run this evening for any unexpected errors and re-submit should you believe an interruption was the cause. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this required emergency code upgrade may cause.
You may follow the status of this maintenance at GT’s status page
As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu .
Best,
The PACE Team