Crane: Extended Downtime Announcement

The CRANE cluster will undergo an extended downtime beginning April 5th. This downtime will be used to upgrade the operating system used on the cluster from an EL6 base to an EL8 base. While it has served us well for over half a decade, the current operating system has reached the end of its supported lifecycle and will no longer receive security updates necessitating this change. Additionally, it is increasingly challenging to support modern research software and codes on an aging platform as more and more of those codes expect or require more modern operating systems. While we understand this may be inconvenient to some, this move is necessary for us to continue supporting the evolving research needs of the University system. This downtime will require at least three days to complete but may require more. Updates will be provided when the system is back online.

During this downtime, the Rhino, Anvil, Attic, and Common (accessible via Rhino) resources will remain available. The servers backing Crane's /work and /home filesystems will be upgraded during this time and will not be accessible even upon special request. If you think you will need access to data on these filesystems during the downtime you will need to copy that data elsewhere prior to the downtime start. Data on Crane's /work and /home filesystems will not be removed during this upgrade. As a reminder, while /home is replicated and backed up, the /work filesystem is intended to serve as a temporary scratch filesystem and has no backups. We don't anticipate any data loss on /work but as always important data on /work should be backed up prior to this scheduled downtime.

Any questions about this upcoming downtime should be directed to hcc-support@unl.edu.