[lm-announce] LMF Filesystem offline this weekend

[Jonathan Buzzard]

Dear Colleagues

This is a reminder that the LMF file system will be offline from 
sometime after 09:30 on Saturday 12 may 2012. The exact start time will 
depend on a number of things and critically when the backup from Friday 
finishes.

Please be aware that any changes after 18:24 on Friday the 11th will not 
be in the backup and could potentially be lost should the upgrade go 
wrong. The backup starts by taking a snapshot of the file system and 
this is the time the snapshot is created.

This is a major upgrade of the OS, the version of GPFS we use, the 
version of HSM we use and the version of Samba we use. These are 
required to fix critical security flaws in our current setup.

In addition we will be switching to using Active Directory 
authentication when the upgrade has finished. Due to continued 
development work we are now able to continue to offer access to the LMF 
via URI's of the following form

     \\lmf-smb\<username>

I anticipate this complex upgrade to take a significant proportion of 
the day. You can track progress through the status page.

JAB.