pete@mimsy.UUCP (Pete Cottrell) (12/19/87)
The University Of Maryland's Computer Science Department is planning
on moving into a new building in the Jan. 4 - Jan. 30 time-frame, assuming
that enough of the problems of getting the building ready can be resolved.
The move will consolidate our machine rooms that are currently in 2 separate
buildings and will also mean that smaller computer labs as well as all
faculty, staff and student offices will be moving.
While the dates are still fuzzy, it looks like this is what we have
now:
January 3 - Hosts gyre.umd.edu and gymble.umd.edu will be shut down
and moved. Hopefully, downtime will be kept to a few days.
January 25(?) - Hosts {mimsy,brillig,tove}.umd.edu will be down for
up to 2 weeks as they are deinstalled, move and reinstalled.
January 3-31 - Various hosts in the cs.umd.edu domain will be down
for short periods of time (a day or 2) as they are relocated.
Note here that the UUCP hosts gymble and mimsy are fairly well
connected, especially in the latter case. This means that all UUCP traffic
passing through these hosts will be cut off as described above. You are
advised to declare gymble and mimsy dead in your pathalias databases around
the times above, and you should not hand-route things through these hosts
during this period.
If mimsy or gymble is your sole connection to the outside world, you
obviously have a problem. We suggest that you contact the UUNET folks about
setting up some sort of feed. We regret that we cannot offer some sort of
interim connectivity, but we expect that things around here would be so
broken anyway that it wouldn't help. We can offer you more information on
how to get in touch with UUNET if you don't know already.
Sending mail to all these machines will be somewhat problematic
during this transition period. We are hoping to have enough hosts up for
long enough that those capable of using mail forwarders (MX records in the
domain name database) will be able to send mail as usual, and have it
redirected to some other local host. The recipients of your mail may not be
able to respond to you, though, until after things have settled down.
Given certain problems we are having in moving mimsy's MILNET
connection, it is likely that mimsy will be unreachable at its MILNET
address (26.2.0.57) for a very extended (1 year?) period of time. Mimsy
the other hosts around here will still be reachable (as will other hosts on
umdnet) via ARPANET and NSFNET paths.
It is also likely that many host IP addresses will change
(temporarily or permanently) during this period. If you use host tables,
either fetch new ones often (or let us know, and we'll try to send updates
to you, too) or convert to domain servers (You should be using these
anyway.) If you're using domain servers, you should experience only
temporary problems as the entries in your cache time out and get replaced
with the new information.
The situation with the move is still changing from day to day, which
makes it impossible to plan anything in advance with respect to this move.
We will do the best we can do to make this change less painful for you (and,
thus, for us), but we do not have high hopes.
Any comments or questions are welcome - you can direct them to
dc-connect@mimsy.umd.edu.
Looking forward to a better future after a few particularly nasty
days,
Pete Cottrell, Computer Science Department
Steve Miller, Institute For Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland, 20742
Phone numbers: (Note that these are likely to change!)
(301) 454-7690 (Pete)
(301) 454-1516 (Steve)
--
Call-Me: Pete Cottrell, Univ. of Md. Comp. Sci. Dept. (301-454-7690)
UUCP: uunet!mimsy!pete ARPA/CSNET: pete@mimsy.umd.edu
******* Baseball in D.C. in '88!!! *******