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SCHEDULED POWER SHUTDOWN ON FRIDAY APRIL 9

There will be a scheduled power shutdown at the NRAO's Edgemont Road building starting at 6 p.m. on Friday, April 9th, and expected to last until about 4 a.m. on Saturday, April 10th.

During this shutdown, the building will be disconnected from its existing power feed from Dominion Virginia Power, and transferred to a new feed from the University of Virginia.

The telephone room will be run from a mobile generator during the shutdown. This generator will support:

- the telephone systems at Edgemont Road, OIC and NTC - NRAO Green Bank's connection to the Internet

but there is no fail-safe for these services should this generator fail.

Direct digital communications between Green Bank, Socorro and Tucson over the NRAO Intranet will be unaffected, but the normal Intranet paths through Charlottesville will NOT be available. The Charlottesville email list server (which hosts most internal email distribution lists and some global lists, e.g. 'fitsbits', some ALMA lists) will be shut down; email addressed to the CV-hosted lists from other sites will be queued at those sites for transmission when the list server is back on-line.

All other computing and communications services (see below), lighting and heating at Edgemont Road will be out of service during the outage, so please do not plan to work in the building after hours on April 9th until power is restored on April 10th. A message describing the status of computing services at Edgemont Road will be available on the Charlottesville Emergency Status phone line (434-296-0200) on the morning of April 10th.

All individual workstations at Edgemont Road should also be shut down before the power goes off (Edgemont Road employees: please see instructions below).

Thank you for your co-operation during this step in upgrading the electrical service at Edgemont Road to support the power demands of the expanded building.

CHARLOTTESVILLE COMPUTING IMPLICATIONS

a) CENTRAL SERVERS

The power shutdown will affect the main Computer Room at Edgemont Road, so ALL the servers therein will be powered down starting shortly after 5 p.m. on Friday April 9th. This means most services will NOT be available during the power shutdown, including:

* Incoming and Outgoing email will be suspended (incoming email will be stored/forwarded later by other NRAO servers). * The dial-in modems (296-030x, and the 800 dial-in number). * DHCP, NIS/YP, and Print servers. * File servers (NFS and windows shares) * Web service to www.cv.nrao.edu, www.alma.nrao.edu, www.aui.edu, and a few others. * Mailing List services (see first item above) * Database services to sql.cv.nrao.edu (the NRAO image gallery will thus be offline) * AIPS and AIPS++ in CV

The servers will be brought up again as soon as possible after power is restored. However, please do not count on any significant access to NRAO-CV computing resources until later on Saturday, April 10th.

b) INDIVIDUAL WORKSTATIONS

The Charlottesville Computing staff ask all EDGEMONT ROAD employees to do the following for your individual computer(s) in this order BEFORE 5 P.M. ON FRIDAY APRIL 9:

- consider making backups of any critical files that are now stored ONLY on your local disks, before you shut your system down (disks that normally spin 24x7 sometimes fail when powered up after a shutdown)

- for Windows systems:

+ perform an orderly shutdown (via the "start" button); + power the computer off when it says it's safe to do so.

- for Linux systems:

+ log out completely from your window manager or gnome/kde; + if given a choice when logging out, choose "power down"; + otherwise, choose the "shut down" option from the "greeter" window where you normally log in.

** FOR ALL SYSTEMS:

+ if the software shutdown does not completely power your computer off, press the power button to do it yourself. + if you have the computer plugged into a UPS (un-interruptable power supply), please turn the UPS off too. The switch will probably be on the front panel of the UPS.

Employees with computers at OIC or NTC need not power down their systems..

c) COMPUTING CONTACTS / SHUTDOWN ASSISTANCE

If you have any questions or need assistance in turning your system off, please contact any of the Charlottesville Computing staff:

- Pat Murphy (x0372) - Gene Runion (x0327) - Warren Richardson (x0213) - Tracy Russell (x0219) - Carolyn White (x0224) - Jeff Uphoff (x0208) - Ernie Allen (x0209)

04/01/04 A. Birdle

%META:TOPICINFO{author="CarlBignell" date="1080738638" format="1.0" version="1.1"}% %META:TOPICPARENT{name="WebHome"}% Power outage in Charlottesville on April 9/10 will impact communications in Green Bank. This could potentially impact observing on April 9/10.

Details:

We now have formal notification from the contractor that he will be shutting down the power at Edgemont Road at 6 pm on Friday, April 9. The 'critical communications' listed in this note include the phones at ER, OIC and NTC, and the routers necessary to connect GB to the Internet through U.Va. The 'necessary equipment' is basically an on-site generator, and your remote IP connectivity will depend on that staying up and running. If it fails, the NRAO/CV telephone PBX will go down with it, so only our direct-line and cell phones will be operative. If all goes as planned, you will not see any interruptions, but there is basically no fail-safe.

All other computing services at ER will be shut down.

Alan Bridle March 30, 2004

-- CarlBignell - 31 Mar 2004