| Nevis 2005 nevis1 Shutoff |
At the end of 2005, I propose to shut down nevis1.
Some of the details are in flux. If you have any comments or questions, please contact Bill Seligman |
| Basic facts |
This is the place to start if you were directed to this web page, but you're not sure what a "nevis1" is, you never login to that machine, or the technical details are of no interest to you.
At 6PM Wed Dec 21 2005, please make sure that you are logged off from whatever Nevis computer system you use, and that you are not running a program that reads your Nevis mail. At 7PM, you can read your mail or login again.
If you are logged in or reading your mail from 6PM-7PM on Wed 21-Dec-05, you risk losing some of your files.
| Complete schedule and technicalities |
After 12 years of service, nevis1 is finally being retired. Most of the Nevis users no longer rely on it. However, a few still login to it, and several users still have home directories on the system. For those users, the proposed schedule is:
In particular, this means that ftp, tftp, and any cvs respositories on nevis1 will no longer be available.
The intent of this is to allow users to identify where they still may be using nevis1 for anything, and to ask for help to accomplish those tasks with systems on the Nevis Linux cluster.
The intent here is to give us a chance to find out if anyone still needs to login to nevis1 itself for any reason.
The file synchronization procedure will take less than an hour. After that, the links on the Linux cluster will be set to point to the location for the files. A quick reboot of the mail server may be necessary.
With the this step, nevis1 will be completely off the network, and be shut down.
If this schedule is too rapid for you, or there are any issues that have not been addressed, please contact me. However, please read the next section first, since your question may be answered there.
Incidentally, if there were to be a major hardware problem on nevis1 before the dates above, I would probably implement the shift immediately, after recovering any files that I could.
| Questions and answers |
It's been several years since you actually needed to login to nevis1 to access those files. They've been available to the Nevis Linux cluster through automount.
If you need to access files on nevis1, login to any of the Nevis Linux cluster boxes assigned to your working group; if you're not a member of a particular experimental group, try hogwarts. The account password is the same one you use to read your mail; not the password you used to login to nevis1 (though the two passwords may be the same).
Just put /a/file in front of the path you're accustomed to using on nevis1. So if your file was /usr15/ssc/jsmith/experiment.dat, look for /a/file/usr15/ssc/jsmith/experiment.dat.
If your home directory is on nevis1, then this has already been taken into account on the Nevis Linux cluster; ~jsmith will still point to the home directory of account jsmith, even after the files are moved to their new location.
The new home for the files on nevis1 is the new DOE server. Note that you do not need login access to the DOE server to access your files!
The nevis1 files are on a separate partition of that server. There are about 150GB of files, and the partition is about 200GB in size. This gives you room for more files in your home directory, mail files in particular.
It is my hope that users' home directories will adiabatically move out of this area and onto the servers of their working groups. This partition and these files are meant for archive purposes, not for active working analyses.
Yes: the IRIX operating system files; the software I installed (ROOT and GCC for IRIX); and SGI-only applications such as Mathematica and IDEAS. The physics software is already available on the Nevis Linux cluster; if we need any of the other software, we'll have to buy new versions.
With the current configuration of the nevis.columbia.edu domain, no e-mail is sent to nevis1; it is all sent to the mail server mail.nevis.columbia.edu (also known as franklin). E-mail sent to any of the following addresses will still be delivered properly:
If you'd like confirmation, send e-mail to <youraccount>@tanya.nevis.columbia.edu (tanya is the name of the box sitting on my desk). It will be correctly routed to the mail server and your account, not to my box. Any mail sent to nevis1 is handled the same way.
All the files on nevis1 are backed up nightly. The files will continue to be backed up nightly from their new location after nevis1 is shut down.