[Linerva-announce] Unscheduled Linerva Reboot yesterday

[Alex Dehnert]

Yesterday evening around midnight Eastern time, Linerva stopped accepting 
new connections, hung when running commands, and generally became 
questionably usable. We believe this to be related to an AFS lock issue. 
We were unable to recover the machine, and the maintainers eventually 
rebooted the machine.

Linerva is now back online. If you had screen or other long-running 
programs, you will need to restart them.

We apologize for the inconvenience.



We would like to take this opportunity to remind users that Linerva is not 
intended for CPU- or memory-intensive workloads, and should not be used to 
store large amounts of data on local disk.

Additionally, SIPB has been considering phasing out Linerva in favor of 
the IS&T-maintained official dialup servers (ie, athena.dialup.mit.edu). 
Please let us know if there are respects in which athena.dialup is not 
currently a suitable substitute for your use of Linerva[*], so that we can 
ensure that transition can be as smooth as possible.

Thanks,
Alex Dehnert
SIPB Linerva Team
linerva at mit.edu

[*] We already know about several aspects, and are working with IS&T to 
fix them. We're hoping to discover how critical those are, and if there 
are advantages of Linerva that we had not thought of.