[18280] in Hotline Meeting
'vos release' of system volumes on Fri and Sat
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (salemme@MIT.EDU)
Thu Sep 16 15:26:55 1993
From: salemme@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 15:26:34 -0400
To: athena-outage@MIT.EDU
Tomorrow morning and Saturday morning, I'm going to be releasing 7.6 system
volumes for all four Athena platforms. I'll send a followup message for each
platform with specific information for each platform. But here's an overview
of what's happening, along with some general information about the process.
Platform Time Reason
---------- ----------- -------------------------------
RS6000 Fri 7am-8am Patch release from 7.6F to 7.6H
DECstation Fri 8am-10am Patch release from 7.6F to 7.6G
Add fourth readonly site
Sun Sat 7am-9am Patch release from 7.6J tp 7.6L
Add third readonly site
VAX Sat 9am-10am Add third readonly site
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes about 'vos release' operations of system pack volumes in the
Athena Computing Environment:
As usual when system pack volumes are released, not all Athena workstations
will be affected, and the ones that are affected may not all be affected in
the same way or to the same extent. In other words, some people will not
notice this operation, but some people will _really_ notice, and we can't
predict exactly who will notice what. Furthermore, we can't predict exactly
how long the 'vos release' will take. In the best case, a user will see
normal performance during the entire operation; in the worst case, a user's
workstation will be completely useless during the entire operation.
Here's what we know from past experience:
- 'vos release's of system pack volumes usually take about an hour.
The length of time depends on the size of the volume, the number of
replicated sites, how busy the AFS servers are, and how busy the
network is.
- There are no "residual" effects of the release operation, so after
it completes, affected workstations return to normal immediately.
- The best time to release system pack volumes is in the mornings,
since that is when we have the smallest number of users. Except in
cases of emergency, we try to release system pack volumes in the
mornings to minimize user-visible outages.
As always, let us know about any questions or problems related to this by
sending mail to 'op'. Thanks.
Athena Systems Support
