Regarding the Engineering Network Outage on 2024-11-02

[Colin Vanden Heuvel]

Dear Euler Users,

By now, you all should have received an announcement (reshared below for good measure) from the College of Engineering about a number of buildings being locked and unavailable during a network outage related to the Engineering Drive utility project. This outage will take place on November 2nd, and it will affect the majority of networked computer systems in the college, including those in our datacenters, such as Euler.

In order to protect the integrity of your research data, we will need to take Euler's login nodes, compute nodes, file storage, and all other cluster resources offline during the outage. This means that you will not be able to access your data, running jobs will be interrupted, and starting today the Slurm scheduler will not start jobs whose time limit would overlap with November 2nd.

The outage is expected to last most of the day, and because it is a weekend, CAE staff will have limited availability to address problems. Euler is scheduled to come back online by Sunday, November 3rd, pending the availability of personnel to address any issues which may arise during the restoration process.

This outage affects even the most critical computer systems within the college, and there is almost no leeway for CAE to make exceptions unless we can identify a risk to human safety. We believe we have addressed those at this time, but if you believe that one hasn't been accounted for, contact your department chair as soon as possible. If you have any questions about how the outage will affect Euler, feel free to reach out to euler-...@engr.wisc.edu and I will do my best to answer them.

Regards,

Colin Vanden Heuvel

A message about the outage from Dean Ian Robertson follows. If you did not receive this message last week, please contact your departmental administration who can try to determine whether you are a member of the correct mailing list(s).

---

Dear faculty, staff and students:

 

On Saturday, Nov. 2, scheduled construction activity will cause a temporary network outage. Every network associated with the College of Engineering will be affected—including those in Water Science and Engineering, Rust-Schreiner Hall, Kegonsa Research Campus, and others not on the main engineering campus. We anticipate this outage will run from approximately 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Nov. 2.

 

All affected buildings will be closed during the outage.

 

During this time, we also will shut down all water (general building as well as lab use) in the Engineering Research Building to reduce the overall number of water shutdowns occurring in that building.

 

IMPORTANT: What does this mean for you?

    Plan ahead. Do not schedule on campus activities on Nov. 2.

    You will not be able to use your Wiscard to access engineering buildings that are normally locked on weekends.

    If you must be in an engineering building during the outage, please submit your request to your department office prior to Oct. 31. In your communication, please describe specifically why your business in the building must occur during the outage, rather than before or after. The college dean’s office will review access requests and will follow up on all requests; those people whose requests are approved will receive escorted access when they arrive.

    Research with hazardous or flammable materials will not be allowed.

 

Once the fiber/network related work has concluded and we have verified that our network is operational, we will notify you. At that time, you will be able to resume your normal activities in our engineering buildings. You may need to reboot equipment or other devices after the outage; for help resolving network-related challenges, contact the CAE helpdesk: https://www.cae.wisc.edu/helpdesk/.

 

Thank you for your cooperation, as well as your patience.

 

Dean Ian Robertson