In order to accommodate the recovery efforts of the campus chilled water outage, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) Network Engineering team postponed last weekend's routine campus network maintenance. Some of this work will be completed during the next monthly maintenance on Saturday, Aug. 24. More critical work will be conducted on Friday, Aug. 2. 

A summary for each component of the Aug. 2 maintenance is listed below. There may be network connectivity disruptions that occur for some subset of network hosts during this maintenance window. Most should automatically resume normal network connections after any disruptions, but some hosts may need to be restarted after the maintenance is complete.

Re-architecture of Network Authentication Backend Networks: 6 – 11:59 p.m.
The backend networks that support the network authentication infrastructure will be re-architected during this maintenance. Users should expect new connections to wireless networks (including eduroam and GTother), as well as wired networks to intermittently fail or take longer than expected during this time. In addition, changes will not be able to be made to LAWN registrations via the LAWN portal or Book of Knowledge during the maintenance window. Once the maintenance is complete, most devices will automatically re-connect without any user interaction, but some devices may require a reboot.

Campus Border Firewall: 9 p.m. – 3 a.m.
In an effort to validate the new redundant design in our core, we will failover our border firewall to its High Availability counterpart. After this is complete, we will perform some routing configuration changes between it and the campus core routers. There may be brief interruptions to campus services for up to 10 minutes while these changes are made.

Campus Distribution Routers (Enable Multicast Routing Feature): 9 p.m. – 3 a.m.
A feature that will enable routing of IP multicast traffic will be enabled for campus distribution routers in North, South, and East Interconnects (NI/SI/EI). This is being done to support future services and therefore no impact to existing network traffic is anticipated.

Upgrade Code on Firewall Appliance: 9 p.m. – 3 a.m.
Firewall operating code will be updated to the latest preferred release to address bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Up-to-date progress will be provided on Georgia Tech’s IT Status Page, status.gatech.edu. After the maintenance is complete, users may visit services.gatech.edu to report any issues believed to be related to any of these maintenances. Campus IT staff who need to report time sensitive issues affecting multiple people and/or departments and require immediate assistance should contact OIT’s Infrastructure Operations Center at 404.894.4669.