August 2018 Power Outage Plan
There is a planned power outage in MC from Tuesday, August 21 to Friday, August 24.
There is also a one-day outage in DC, which will complicate keeping services up during the entire outage.
Timeline
Before Monday, August 20
- Complete plan for outage
- Move equipment to DC (if necessary)
- Take backups of LDAP and Kerberos, and download offsite
Monday, August 20
- Shutdown general-use computing services
- Transfer computing services to redundant / temporary systems
Sometime during the outage window
- Shutdown DC systems before the building outage
After the outage
- Being restoring normal services
Systems
Mirror
TODO. Syscom is currently working with CSCF to identify a plan for mirror.
Website
The CSC website is a static site, and will be straightforward to maintain during the outage.
All user and club sites are hosted in home directories (which are unavailable), so we will display an outage page (with a 503 status code).
Since the outage is for a week, we need to maintain email services during the outage. An initial plan by ztseguin and jxpryde:
- rsync users' .forward, .procmailrc and .maildir to a local directory on mail, allowing mail to continue as expected
However, this requires:
- Users not reference any scripts, programs, etc. in their procmailrc file that reference things in their home directory
Authentication
Authentication is located in both MC and PHY.
While the MC node is down, the PHY node can continue to answer to authentication requests. However, updating membership and changing passwords will not be available if the MC node is down.
We may consider moving auth1 to DC for the outage.
DNS
CSC's DNS service is located in both MC and PHY.
We may consider moving the MC DNS node to DC, but this is not necessary to maintain services during the outage.
NOTE: The MC node is the master node, and we will need to ensure that the SOA record contains a long enough expiry time so the PHY doesn't stop serving zones.