[Linerva-announce] Linerva outage today

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Hi,

>From approximately 1 PM to 5 PM today, Linerva was offline due to an AFS 
crash. This outage was much longer than usual because we upgraded to a 
newer prerelease (pre7) of OpenAFS 1.6, which should bring several 
stability improvements.

We were planning to schedule downtime for Linerva later this week to 
upgrade to OpenAFS 1.6.0pre7. In addition to having wanted to do so for 
some time, this was made more urgent by increasing AFS instability 
problems over the past week. (This reboot should resolve any "Connection 
timed out" errors you may have seen in normal operation on Linerva; if you 
still see those, please let us know.) Unfortunately, the AFS instability 
issues caused a kernel crash at 1 PM today which we could not recover 
from, and we decided for the sake of future stability to continue with the 
plan of building and upgrading OpenAFS 1.6.0pre7 for Linerva, instead of 
rebooting quickly and scheduling further downtime for later in the week.

Linerva is back online now and should be stable. We apologize for the 
inconvenience and the extended outage; if you have any questions, feel 
free to contact us at linerva at mit.edu.

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
SIPB Linerva team
linerva at mit.edu