Quarterly patching downtimes - 11/20, 11/21, 12/04

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, November 20th, Saturday, November 21st and Friday, December 4th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Friday, 11/20/2020 between 5pm and 10pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (afs) servers - gl.umbc.edu home directories will be offline
• Between 9:15pm and 10pm only: Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica). 
• Between 9:15pm and 10pm only: The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)

Saturday, 11/21/2020 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT