[CCoE Notice] Network maintenance during 9 a.m.-noon this Sunday morning

[Charles John Young Jr.]

Over the past several months, the College has experienced several 
wide-spread network outages.  Because the outages have affected nearly all 
of our servers, the adverse impact on the College has been high.  Up to 
this point, neither Engineering Computing nor UH Information Technology 
has been able to identify the cause of these outages, other than they all 
seem to involve some form of interaction with the College's server 
interconnection to the main campus LAN.

In an effort to resolve this issue, we will be reconfiguring our network 
switches that support most of the College's servers this morning, 
beginning at 9 a.m.  If things go as planned, all services should be 
restored by noon today.  During this outage, many of the College's 
services will be unavailable (including Blackboard).  We will make every 
effort to minimize the duration of this outage.

The purpose of this reconfiguration is two-fold.  Clearly, we hope that it 
resolves or greatly reduces the likelihood of further outages.  Also, we 
believe that this reconfiguration will significantly improve our ability 
to identify the source of the problem should it recur.

I apologize for this inconvenience, but it is essential that we identify 
the cause of this problem, and ensure the future high availability of our 
computing services.


John Young
Engineering Computing