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New PM Schedule

ECN has changed its schedule for system maintenance. We used to shut machines down every other month to run diagnostics and make changes to the hardware configurations. These preventive maintenance periods (PMs) were scheduled between 6pm and 11pm on most machines. This meant the systems were down for 30 hours per year for diagnostics. Every semester, some machine was scheduled to be down during the crunch week just before the semester ended. This was not convenient for the users and was often changed at the last minute.

We decided that it would be best to find another method to do these PMs. Now the ECN will schedule PMs during the four break periods of the year. The PMs for the timesharing systems will be done during Spring break, Summer break, Fall break and Christmas break. These PMs are scheduled for 5pm to 9pm. This means the systems will be down for 16 hours per year for diagnostics. As in the past, a notice will appear in the Message Of The Day (motd) one week before the PM is to be done. This should give the users ample time to schedule around these downtimes.

The SUN servers have the unique ability to run some of their diagnostics with the system online. We decided to make use of this feature and run the SUN system diagnostics between 3am and 5am Sunday mornings. When the diagnostics are running, a message will be sent to each terminal informing users that the system may be slow while the diagnostics are executing. We will still shut the SUN servers down twice a year to run the remainder of the diagnostics that will not run online. These downtimes will be during the Summer and Christmas breaks.

We hope these changes will prove convenient and beneficial to the users of the ECN.

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