ITS Help Desks

All library systems have been restored.

All communications problems have been resolved.
All AIS systems are now available.

From 6:45 until 7:55 nfs.pass.psu.edu was not responding for NFS Version 3 mounts. The cause of the issue, was a restart of one of the supporting services to the NFS server. During this time, NFS version 4 was functioning properly.

In the aftermath of the fiber cut that affected the Hazleton, Scranton, Schuylkill, and Wilkes-Barre campus yesterday, we have also been alerted to a potential hardware issue on Telecom4. On Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 5:00am, TNS will perform maintenance on the hardware module where these errors are present. During this time, the following campuses will be on redundant connections back to University Park for approximately 5 minutes:

Hazleton
Scranton
Schuylkill
Wilkes-Barre
Hershey
Dubois
McKeesport
Freeport
Northpointe
Shenango
Beaver
New Kensington
Fayette

The failing appliance has been removed from service, and all search requests should succeed again.

ITS will repair the failed node and return it to service later. At this time, the cause is unknown.

Level3 confirmed the fiber cut in Allentown has been corrected, and connectivity to these campuses has been restored as of 7:50pm.

The router having issues was temperature related. The cooling where the router is installed failed. The cooling was partially fixed as of 12:30 and the router started to recover then. As of 1:00 PM today, things seem to be running normally. Cooling is almost all restored.

On Monday, October 26th, 2009, TNS will replace a Fiber Optics Converter Chassis that is having hardware problems. Networks in University Support Building I and II will affected as well as Redundant IB Connections that utilize the fiber optic converter chassis. The outage will be minimal while the fiber converters are moved to the new chassis. All networks will be up by 7:00am.

In ANGEL courses/groups with large rosters, when a mail message is sent to many or all individuals, a long delay may occur between the clicking of the Send button and the appearance of the confirmation page. In some instances, the sender's browser may stop receiving information from the server, and an error may be shown. Even in such a case, however, the mail is sent to the list of recipients and it will appear in the sender's Sent mailbox when the sending process completes.

The Information Technology Services (ITS) ANGEL support team is aware of this issue and has been working with the vendor to solve it, but is not certain when the problem will be resolved. In the meantime, course/group editors are asked to allow time for mail to be sent and to check their Sent mail folder in cases when they are concerned that a message was not sent. ITS regrets the inconvenience this issue causes.

The Libraries catalog (The CAT) will be unavailable during the 5 - 7 a.m. maintenance window on Tuesday, October 27. While a security patch is being applied, both Production and Test environments will be affected. Reports will not run until the patch install is completed. The following list of resources will also be affected during the maintenance period:
Metalib
ABLE - UL Budget Request
Ask! E-mail reference services
Administrative Action Plan
AgNIC Youth Development
ARL Stats
Digitized Collections at Penn State website
Portions of PA's Past: Digital Bookshelf at Penn State
Employee Directory website
Employee Directory Maintenance
HR Employee Directory Maintenance
Endowments Application
E-newspapers title search
Erlic
HR Part Time Application
Instructional Programs Classes
IT Workplan
LFO Ballots
LLS Room Finder
Microform Indexes
EMS: Abandoned Mines of PA
Oliver
Promotion and Tenure Recognition Site
Signage Form
Selectors Listing
Serials Review
TMI database

Along with:
Helpdesk
Alumni Database Authentication
Course Description Archive Application
EPIC

For a period of 23 minutes between 3:04 PM and 3:27 PM, networking services to Penn State Dickinson: The School of Law were operating in a degarded mode. After investigation, this appeared to be circuit-related and we contacted the circuit provider. They are doing their own investigation to identify the root cause. Networking services are operating at normal levels at this time.

The network statistics and VoIP features are now available and operating at normal levels of service.

Our circuit provider has restored the primary circuit between Penn State University Park and the Harrisburg campus. As a result, networking services to the Harrisburg, Dickinson: The School of Law, Mont Alto, and York campuses have been operating at normal levels since 1:08 PM.

On Friday, October 23rd, 2009, TNS will upgrade from three WS-X6524-100FX-MM modules to two WS-X6148-FE-SFP modules in the Pattee2 router. During this time, there will be a brief outage as networks are moved from the old module into a slot in the new module. This will only affect customers connected to Pattee2 at 100MB. All services will be restored by 7:00am.

Service may be affected during the ITS maintenance window (5:00-7:00am) on October 23, 2009.

The following Library applications will be interrupted during the 5-7 a.m. maintenance window on Tuesday, October 20.
ABLE - UL Budget Request
Ask! E-mail reference services
Administrative Action Plan
AgNIC Youth Development
ARL Stats
Digitized Collections at Penn State website
Portions of PA's Past: Digital Bookshelf at Penn State
Employee Directory website
Employee Directory Maintenance
HR Employee Directory Maintenance
Endowments Application
E-newspapers title search
Erlic
HR Part Time Application
Instructional Programs Classes
IT Workplan
LFO Ballots
LLS Room Finder
Microform Indexes
EMS: Abandoned Mines of PA
Oliver
Promotion and Tenure Recognition Site
Signage Form
Selectors Listing
Serials Review
TMI database

Along with:
Helpdesk
Alumni Database Authentication
Course Description Archive Application
EPIC

The service has been restored. Clients should be able to receive updates again.

On Thursday, October 15th, 2009, TNS will perform maintenance work on the Transition Fiber Optics Converter Chassis in the Research Park (Penn Stater) Telecom closet. This will only impact networks on the ResearchPark2 router that utilize the Fiber Optics Converter. There will be a brief network outage as we determine the source of the errors within the chassis. All networks will be normalized by 7:00am.

We have been informed that our circuit provider has canceled the scheduled maintenance for Penn State Harrisburg on Tuesday, October 20th. Therefore, networking services will not be disrupted as anticipated.

Our technical difficulties were resolved by 12:45 pm. Again, our apologies for the disruption this has caused.

We have disabled the quota code we enabled this morning. This was done at 12:10 today. WebMail started preforming normally at about 12:15. We will keep the WebMail quota off until further notice.