We are following up with an update on the schedule for OIT’s planned network maintenance. OIT’s Network Engineering team will be conducting two maintenance activities scheduled for the evening of Friday, September 11th, from 7:00pm to 4:00am. These maintenance activities will affect connections of PACE to the outside Internet that is anticipated to last 30 minutes or less from the start of the activity, which may occur at any point during this updated and longer maintenance time window.
What’s about to happen: On Friday, September 11th, starting at 7:00pm – 4:00am (September 12th), Network Engineering team will be upgrading the data center firewall appliances to the latest code that is recommended by Palo Alto who has addressed serious security vulnerabilities with their latest released code. To reassure you, OIT’s network team has been operating with some controls in place to address these vulnerabilities, and this planned upgrade will further reduce our risk. Second maintenance activity also starts on Friday, September 11th, Network Engineering team will be swapping service to a more capable Network Address Translation (NAT) appliance in Coda datacenter, as the one currently in Coda is being overloaded. These activities will affect PACE’s connection to/from the Internet.
Who is impacted: PACE users will not be able to connect to PACE resources and/or they may lose connection during this maintenance window that may last 30 minutes or less from the start of the activity at any point during the maintenance time window. We encourage users to avoid running interactive jobs (e.g., VNC/X11) that rely on an active SSH connection to a PACE cluster during this time frame to avoid sudden interruptions due to a loss of connection to the PACE resources. Batch jobs that are running and queued in the PACE schedulers will operate normally; however, any jobs that require resources outside of PACE or Internet will be subject to interruptions during these maintenance activities. These maintenance activities will not affect any of the PACE storage systems.
What PACE will do: PACE will remain on standby during these activities to monitor the systems, conduct testing and report on any interruptions in service. For up-to-date progress, please check the Georgia Tech’s status page, https://status.gatech.edu.
If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.