KAIST Sage server news

This week I will be upgrading the servers here.

First: both servers will be upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04.

Second: the Groundhog Day server will be shut down and replaced with a Sage cell server. The cell server, I think, offers the kind of no-registration, just-compute-the-answer service that the Groundhog Day server attempted to provide.

Just a reminder: power will be shut off to the entire KAIST campus this Sunday, from 9:00 to 18:00. And since I can't access the Sage server on the weekend, it will be off until Monday morning.

I will also use this time to upgrade to Sage 4.7.2.

There will be a campus-wide power outage on November 6, from 9:00-17:00, for some kind of safety check and installation of new equipment. The Sage servers here will, of course, not be available during that time, and since I don't have access to the server room on the weekend, it won't be until Monday at 9:00 or so that they will be available again.

So: this server will be shut down for about 24 hours, starting November 6 at 9:00.

Last weekend the Sage servers were unavailable because someone turned off all the power to the math department server room and apparently didn't think to turn the machines back on when the power was restored. I can't access that room during the weekend, so it was not until this morning that the server got turned on again.

Also, this coming weekend, the Sage servers will be unavailable because of campus network upgrades. If I'm reading the email right, all network service will be down from Friday 22:00 to Monday noon. This seems like a completely unreasonable amount of time to have the entire network down, but it does coincide with a holiday here during which almost no one will be on campus, and afterwards, it seems like there will be gigabit ethernet right to the Sage server (with a 10 gigabit campus backbone). So perhaps access will get faster.

I'll be rebooting the Sage servers on Wednesday, the 10th of August so kernel updates can take effect. They will be down for perhaps half an hour, starting around 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, Korea time.

On Friday, 1 April at 9:00 Korea time I will reboot the KAIST Sage servers so that some kernel updates can take effect. With some other maintenance, I expect downtime of perhaps 30 minutes.

On the morning of Wednesday 20 January I’ll be taking both the Memorial Day and Groundhog Day servers down for upgrades to Sage 4.6.1 and security updates. I’ll start at 10:00 a.m. Korea time (UTC+9) and expect the entire affair to take about an hour.

Sometime on Friday, the network controller driver crashed, and the Sage servers became unavailable. The machine was running just fine, but was not accessible from the network. Because this happened on a weekend, I wasn’t able to investigate and fix the problem until Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Sage servers were down from yesterday morning until just now because of a power outage that I didn’t know about — on Saturday night, I discovered that the entire campus would have the power disconnected all day Sunday. And since I can’t get into the server room on Sundays, I had to wait until today to turn the server back on.

So, sorry for the downtime.

Both Sage servers will be upgraded to Sage 4.6 and rebooted on Friday, 5 November, sometime between 10:00 and noon Korea time.

Due to a kernel upgrade, I’ll be rebooting the notebook server on 9 September, probably early in the morning. Expected downtime is only a few minutes. I would do it at 9:00, but I teach at that time…

On the morning of Monday 14 June, I’ll upgrade the virtual machines that host the Groundhog and Memorial Day servers. I’ll start at 9:00 and should be finished in an hour or two. The servers will of course be shut down during that time.

Update…

My blog posting script messed up and didn’t post this announcement properly. So, let’s wait until Wednesday 16 June, also at 9:00, to actually do the upgrade.

I’ll be upgrading the Sage server to the new Ubuntu release on the morning of Friday, 28 May. Both the Memorial Day and Groundhog Day servers will be shut down during that time. I expect this to only take a couple hours at most.

Note that this is just upgrading the OS of the host computer; the virtual machines that the Memorial Day and Groundhog Day servers run in will stay the same. I hope to upgrade those next week.

I made a dumb mistake while trying to upgrade Sage on the Memorial Day server—I deleted the old working version before realizing that I had downloaded a new, non-working version (it was a 64-bit version, and I needed a 32-bit version). So the Memorial Day server will be down for several hours while I compile the new version. No user data was affected.

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone. Here’s an interesting post by author Rudy Rucker about Groundhog Day. He says that the movie Groundhog Day is “one of the very best science-fiction movies ever made, and has a very clever and philosophically profound treatment of time.”

The KAIST Sage servers will be down briefly Wednesday morning (Korea time) for upgrading Sage 4.3.1. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour, probably around 9:00 a.m. here.

Harald Schilly, the sagemath.org webmaster, is once again running a survey of Sage users. If you are reading this, you certainly qualify as a person that should take the survey. Here’s the announcement; to take the survey, click here.

As a reminder, the Sage server will be down all day Sunday, November 15 because of a campus-wide power shutdown for some construction. I won’t be able to start anything up until Monday morning.

Power will be turned off campus-wide on Sunday 15 November, so the Sage server will be off too. The power will be turned off early Sunday morning and I won’t be able to get into the server room until Monday morning.

I’m a little irritated about this, as it’s the second campus-wide power outage this year, but given Korea’s less-than-spotless record with infrastructure safety, I suppose it’s good that they are doing inspections and major construction with the power off.

The new KAIST Sage server is up and mostly ready for the switchover. I will contact the campus IT people and request that they switch sagenb.kaist.ac.kr to the new IP address. I will request that they do this on Friday 9 October, so expect downtime this Friday. You will still access the server at http://sagenb.kaist.ac.kr, so no changes will be visible on your end.

The virtual machines that host the servers will get copied over, so no user data will be lost.

The department’s new Sage server will be delivered this week. We’ll get it up and running, and then sometime soon switch everything over. I’ll post about any downtime when I know more—hopefully it will be this weekend.

The Sage servers have been down since Friday because of a IP address / DNS problem. I moved to a new office (building E2, room 2209 if you’re on the KAIST campus), and KAIST’s network (1) does some pretty strict MAC address filtering and (2) does IP subnets by building. So I needed someone to put my computer on the “allowed” list, and to give me a new IP address. Between people who didn’t answer email, people who didn’t answer their phones, and general bureaucracy, only now—Tuesday afternoon Korea time—is the new IP address starting to propagate through the DNS.

If you can read this, it’s working properly.

The soon-to-come “real” Sage server will be in a server rack and obviously won’t ever be unavailable if I have to move offices!

The bad news is that the Sage servers will be down later today because I’m moving to a new office. The good news is that my department is buying a “real” server to run Sage here at KAIST! This server will (I’m hoping) be in a normal server rack somewhere with a proper power suppy and cooling, instead of sitting next to my desk. The “real” server should be running by October; watch this space for updates.

On Sunday I will leave for a conference, and right after that be away on vacation. I’ll be away until August 24th. I can do most administration tasks remotely, but if something truly crazy happens, it may take a while to get things running again. (In a worst-case scenario, I’ll email someone in the department here to go into my office and reboot the machine.)

It’s unlikely that there will be any unexpected or long-term downtime because of this, but as we all know, computers have a special talent for failing despite our best efforts to make them work!

The webserver that serves up this news page hasn’t been working properly, so I restarted it and everything works now. That webserver is completely independent from the Sage servers, so even if the main sagenb.kaist.ac.kr page isn’t coming up, you can try https://sagenb.kaist.ac.kr:8022 or https://sagenb.kaist.ac.kr:8066, the direct links to the Groundhog Day and Memorial Day servers, and see if those are working. As always, if something isn’t working, please email me or visit my main KAIST homepage, which is entirely separate from the Sage servers.

In other news, the release of Sage 4.1 is imminent and when that happens I will upgrade both servers.

(Interestingly, the time as I write this post about Memorial Day is 11:11—the World War I armistice took effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.)

Both servers will be down on the morning of Friday, 5 June to upgrade to the new and shiny Sage 4.0. I anticipate an hour or two of downtime, perhaps from 9:00 to 11:00 in the morning.

Saturday is June 6th, Memorial Day in Korea.

This Thursday starting at noon (Korea time; that’s 3:00 am UTC and Wednesday 10:00 pm US Central time) I’ll have both Sage servers down for upgrades. I’m also upgrading the host server to Ubuntu 9.04. I’m guessing things will be down for an hour or two. I’ll upgrade the servers to Sage version 3.4.1.

I’ll be upgrading both the Groundhog Day and Memorial Day servers to Sage 3.4 this evening. Read about the cool stuff in Sage 3.4. In particular, the documentation now uses the lovely Sphinx system and looks great.

Enjoy, and do tell me if there is any trouble.

I had never seen the movie Groundhog Day when I set up the KAIST Sage server; I just knew the premise. I figured if I’m running a Groundhog Day server, I really should watch the movie, and I did that recently.

It is a great movie, and I highly recommend watching it over and over and over again…

Pretty much the entire KAIST campus will have its electrical power turned off on March 1st for construction work. The wording of the announcement suggests that this is the last large-scale power outage for the foreseeable future.

Officially, the power outage starts at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 6:00 p.m. on March 1. I may not go into my office and restart everything when the power comes back on, so the servers may be down until Monday morning Korea time.

It’s February 2nd, Groundhog Day, and since we run a “Groundhog Day” server, it seems appropriate to wish everyone a happy Groundhog Day.

Last night I rebooted the host server, and for some reason the Groundhog Day server virtual machine isn’t working. I’m trying to fix it, but it may take me a day or two.

In the meantime, the Memorial Day server is working, so you can email me for an account there.

I am leaving for vacation until January 4 and won’t have much internet access, so if the servers have problems, it may not get fixed until I return.

The so-called “Groundhog Day” server, which gets completely reset every day, is now live and should be working. Check it out:

https://sagenb.kaist.ac.kr:8022/

I’ll be tinkering with the server in the near future so no guarantee that it’ll be working at all over the next couple days.

I upgraded the server to Sage 3.2. There shouldn’t be any noticeable changes, except for fewer bugs and stuff like that.

Another reminder that the server will be down all day Sunday because of a scheduled power outage. It’ll get restarted on Monday morning.

All services at sagenb.kaist.ac.kr—this website and the Sage server—will be offline all day on Sunday 23 November because of a scheduled power outage. I don’t generally come into my office on Sunday (especially when the power is out) so the server probably won’t get turned on again until Monday morning.

Wow! I’m really glad Obama won the election.

I suppose this has nothing to do with the Sage server, except that in many ways I think Obama will better support science and technology in the US—and since Sage is free software with a large base of developers in the US, there will hopefully be a positive effect here.

So, sagenb.kaist.ac.kr is up…is my news page working?