Effective Friday, March 19, Information Technology Services will implement a "Fix-It Fridays" policy to establish a weekly window of time -- from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Fridays -- to perform necessary maintenance on computers and network systems. During this time frame, important production systems (to include e-mail, file servers, Parnassus systems, and others) and/or network communications may be unavailable.
While there has always been a need to perform regular updates and maintenance on our systems, in today's increasingly hostile network environment it has become even more critical that we perform these updates on a regular basis.
We will not use this time every Friday, nor will we take down all systems and the network on any given Friday. The idea is to create a regularly scheduled maintenance interval that the campus community can plan on. Our intent will be to provide information in advance about exactly what systems and services will be affected.
Whenever possible we will post an announcement on the computing status page (see "System Notices" on the ITS home page) by noon on Wednesday of each week listing those systems and services that will be down during the upcoming Friday's fix-it window.
In urgent cases involving the security of our systems, we would update the message and do it that Friday without the usual notice. Also, it is important to understand that this will not completely eliminate the need for other down times
for more complex upgrades or for emergency actions required to maintain
the function or security of critical systems. However, we will always
make every effort to see if the work can be done in the "Fix-It Friday"
window.
If you would like e-mail notification of all planned system outages and
other important system status information, please subscribe to our
Helpdesk Alert e-mail list.
Related Links:
ITS home page
ITS Helpdesk -- Subscribe to Helpdesk Alert e-mail list
Contributed by Ed Fuller
