Rain indoors (2017 May 23; updated 24th)
Water and computers don't mix: some disruption.
With the recent heavy rain, on Friday night, we had some water back up from rainwater downpipes into one of our computer rooms (fortunately not our main one). There doesn't appear to be any damage to our machines, but as a precaution, on Saturday, I moved two machines implementing backup school infrastructure, and turned off some others.
The currently down machines are:
- In Astronomy:
{r2d2,c3po,shiraa}.astro
– data and one compute machine - In PPT:
ptcn{1..5}.physics
– compute machines pptlogin.physics
It's pptlogin
that caused knock-on problems. This
machine acted (i) as a bastion host for the PPT group, for off-campus
access to local machines; and (ii) as a gateway machine for access to DiRAC
computing resources used by the PPT group.
Function (i) has always been a bit of an anomaly, now resolved, as
of yesterday, by making all of the PPT home directories visible on
login.physics.gla.ac.uk
, so that machine is usable as an externally
visible SSH host. Function (ii) has been resolved by making
login.physics
the whitelisted machine for DiRAC access. We can
therefore dispense with the pptlogin
machine completely, and it won't
be turned on again.
When Estates and Buildings conclude the room is watertight, at some point in the current or next week, I'll turn these back on again.
How did a room in the centre of the basement get rain-damaged? You may well ask; such are the delights of the Kelvin Building's internal architecture.
Stay cheerful.
Updated 2017 May 24: disposition of pptlogin
.