COMPLETED: Network outage June 11th from 9-11am

6 June 2023

Update: All Systems should be online. If you have network or service connectivity issues after these updates, please contact the ITS Helpdesk by calling 507-222-5999.

What is happening? 

Nearly all Carleton technology will be unavailable starting at 9AM on Sunday, June 11, 2023 due to critical network upgrades. We expect downtime to be under 90 minutes.

We appreciate your patience as we perform this maintenance, which is an important piece of improving network reliability. 

What do you need to do?  

Plan not to use Carleton technology and systems from 9AM until 11AM on Sunday, June 11. We will communicate any changes from this schedule on this blog post. 

If you need to do course grading during this time, please download grades from Moodle before this outage. Academic technologists will be available by appointment to help you prepare in advance.

What if you have problems after systems are back

If you have network or service connectivity issues after these updates, please contact the ITS Helpdesk by calling 507-222-5999.

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Why are we doing this

This will complete the transition of the college’s primary network core to new, fully supported technology. A big part of this transition was accomplished over spring break, and we are finally down to the last (but most visible) network moves. This final step will move the 10 gigabit connections that the traffic to our NetApp storage infrastructure relies on and will therefore disrupt all of our core services that rely on that storage. The old core had a major disruptive failure on the first day of classes in Fall 2021, and it is out of support (meaning that it would be difficult or impossible to repair if it broke). To address those issues, we have been working on migrating to this new infrastructure for over a year and are doing this now before summer research begins. 

Additional technical details: 

The first step of this maintenance will be powering down all virtual machines on our VMWare virtualization environment.  This is a precautionary measure because our VMWare environment relies on NFS to the NetApp, a service that will be interrupted during the very brief change over of the physical network connections.  Nearly every technology on campus will be unavailable during this window.

At 9AM we will begin to bring down running VMs in an orderly fashion.  This process should take no longer than 30 minutes.  Once the environment is shut down, the network connections will be moved.  This will take no longer than 1 minute.  We will then test to ensure connectivity and network paths are correct.  This should take no more than 5 minutes.  Once validated we will begin bringing up VMs in priority order (priority being critical infrastructure first followed by academic resources followed by secondary and tertiary systems).  Bringing the environment back online should take no longer than an hour.