I⁢ Announces Routine Maintenance of Computing Services

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Instructional & Information Technology (I&IT) has announced scheduled times when campus computing services will be unavailable so that technical personnel can perform regular maintenance.

Known in the technology world as “maintenance windows,” these planned outages are opportunities for technicians to perform service and upgrades on applications such as BroncoDirect, Blackboard, the campus voice and data networks and e-mail. When maintenance is in process, some services may be interrupted.  

“Maintenance is necessary to ensure that key services are reliable,” says Debra Brum, I&IT interim vice president. “Maintenance will be scheduled so as to maximize the availability of services and minimize the occurrence of unplanned outages.”

Scheduled maintenance windows are:

  • Daily, 5-5:30 a.m. — BroncoDirect will not be available.  
  • Thursdays, 9:30-11:30 p.m. — Any I&IT service may be interrupted during this period, including e-mail, BroncoDirect, Blackboard, WebCT, the campus network and the campus Web servers.  
  • Sundays, 5-8 a.m. — Any I&IT service may occasionally be interrupted during this period, if maintenance cannot be accommodated on Thursday nights.  

The campus has more than 400 network switches and 100 servers that need regular maintenance. Tasks performed during the maintenance windows include re-starting servers and switches to clear memory; hardware upgrades; software upgrades, in the form of new versions or “patches”; and machine replacements.

“We will perform as much of our maintenance as possible on Thursday nights, with Sunday morning serving as a secondary window.  Our goal is to minimize system unavailability,” says Brum. “Where possible, we will schedule maintenance to avoid critical dates, such as those associated with registration and grading.”

I&IT publishes news of its planned outages and other alerts at www.cpp.edu/~ehelp/alerts.html.