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Q4 Maintenance Downtime

NCI systems will be offline for scheduled maintenance 8:00 am - 6:00 pm  AEDT Tuesday 5 November 2024. 

Maintenance will include updates to:

  • Gadi compute nodes
  • Lustre file systems: includes /scratch and all /gdata file systems
  • Cloud
  • ARE and data services
  • Network infrastructure
  • Support ticket services

NCI user support will not be available for 4 hours (TBC) on the day of maintenance.

Gadi - How to prepare

Gadi users can do the following to prepare for this scheduled downtime:

  • Run any significant Gadi jobs needed to support milestones or deadlines as soon as possible.
  • Back up or move any important data in /scratch directories to appropriate longer-term storage locations, e.g. project directories on /gdata before 4 November.
  • Pause any automated scripts used for routine tasks involving Gadi, /scratch, /gdata or cloud or data services. Plan to restart these after completion of maintenance. 
  • Plan for interruption to any services which rely on Lustre file systems: /scratch, /gdata. 

Gadi job queues will be drained in advance of the scheduled downtime. Queued jobs that would normally run during the maintenance period will be held until Gadi resumes normal service. 

Nirin Cloud - How to prepare

All virtual machines running on the NCI Nirin Cloud service will be shut down no later than 6:00 am AEDT on 5 November. 

If your project VMs have application dependencies, for example, a database service which should be shutdown before a presentation service, the NCI Cloud team requests that you perform a controlled shut down of all VM resources before 6:00 am AEDT Tuesday 5 November. All projects will need to plan to restart all VM services via the Nirin Dashboard (https://cloud.nci.org.au) after completion of the maintenance downtime. (Note that automated restart via metadata tags is no longer supported for Nirin cloud.)

Before the scheduled downtime starts, any cloud instances with gdata NFS mounts should be shut down. Instances still running while the gdata file systems are unavailable will need to be rebooted when the maintenance outage is completed.

Instances with volumes attached should be shut down before the scheduled downtime. Any instances with volumes which are still running on the morning of the outage will beed to be rebooted after completion of maintenance.

Cloud instance owners are responsible for bringing their instances back up after completion of maintenance. Cloud user instances will not restart automatically, and will not be restarted by the NCI Cloud Team. 

ARE - How to prepare

All ARE services will be shut down prior to the maintenance downtime at 6:00 am AEDT Tuesday 5 November. ARE services will be automatically restored at completion of the maintenance downtime.

User Support

Contact NCI user support if you have specific questions about how to prepare for the scheduled maintenance downtime: help@nci.org.au .


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