During the Institute holiday closing from Dec. 25 to Jan. 4, Information Systems (IS) will provide service levels similar to those offered on weekends and holidays. For most services, this means that designated staff are on call to deal with outages and other emergencies.
MITnet, e-mail, phones, voice mail, TSM backups, and Athena and win.mit.edu network services will be available. However, IS recommends that users back up their data and shut down desktop machines, private Athena workstations and monitors.
Staff in the W91 Data Center will provide limited coverage that will focus on critical mainframe batch production processing and critical production printing such as Payroll.
Walk-in services will be closed. These include the Computing Help Desk, Athena Consulting, Accounts, the MIT Computer Connection, PC Service, Volume License Software Distribution and the ATIC Lab. Users may submit problems or questions through the usual phone and electronic channels; there will be limited staffing to watch for and respond to urgent issues.
All Athena network services, such as Zephyr and AFS, will continue to operate, and locker software will be available. The win.mit.edu domain will be available, but users should plan container requests accordingly since it might take several days to process them during the closing.
The Athena clusters in rooms 56-129 and 1-142 will remain open. However, due to the possibility of power fluctuations during upgrades at MIT's cogeneration plant on Dec. 26-27, most Athena clusters and the Building 37 Windows cluster in room 37-312 will be shut down starting at 10 a.m. on Dec. 24. Selected clusters will be reopened beginning at 10 a.m. on Dec. 28, including those in rooms W20, E51-090, 12-182 and 37-312.
Departments with servers that need to stay online during the closing should make sure they give accurate contact information to Information Systems for those servers.
For more information see http://web.mit.edu/is/news/headlines/closing.html.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 17, 2003.
