Eskimo North will be undergoing some necessarily disruptive maintenance early Saturday February 16th, shortly after midnight.  I will be upgrading Linux kernels on a number of machines which requires a reboot on the upgraded machine.  Additionally, mail, which has NFS dependencies on the upgraded machine will need to be rebooted.

The reboots should only entail a brief outage of several minutes, however, the mail server will need about ten minutes (it’s an older machine and work is in progress to replace it) but occasionally it does not go down smoothly and requires an in person kick in which case that will add about half an hour to the mail downtime.

The machines being rebooted that will have service impact are Iglulik which serves files for all the other machines, ftp/www, shellx, and ultra7/mail.

If you are on one of the other shell machines and shortly after midnight your session freezes, if you just wait it out it should come back within about five minutes.

Shellx will first experience a freeze like the other shell machines while Iglulik reboots, then it will be rebooted and you will need to re-login.

After a boot, nx may require several attempts to connect successfully.  It seems to come alive in stages and takes longer than the rest of the server to stabilize.