nyftp.netbsd.org down for datacenter overhaul; daily builds offline
16 September, 2017 by tls@NetBSD.ORG | netbsd
NetBSD users and developers, NetBSD's New York build cluster and associated services will be offline beginning Monday, September 18, 2017, for a period of about two weeks. This means that, through early October 2017, our daily builds of NetBSD and pkgsrc will not be available. NetBSD's cluster runs in space generously made available by numerous faculty members, researchers, and with assistance from the staff of the Computer Science Department and Computing Research Facilities of Columbia University. As a point of interest, its current location is approximately 10 feet away from the former location of the experimental multiprocessor which was my own introduction to "real computing" in the 1980s -- in the same machine room, in a new rack, but on the very same raised floor. It is roughly halfway between the former locations of the VAX on which we read our email, and the VAX reserved for those who insisted on editing their code with Emacs. Nearly 40 years later, and after the entire engineering building has been reconstructed around it, the datacenter in question is receiving a very heavy overhaul. Considerable effort has been expended to ensure our systems were not impacted by most of this work, which has been ongoing since the spring; but now we will (of course) temporarily shut down the NetBSD cluster to accommodate the power and cooling adjustments that must be made by our very generous hosts. We apologize for the short notice, which is due to the uncertainties so often encountered with work at the end of long and complex construction projects. NetBSD's release engineering team will work to minimize the impact on the 8.0 release cycle, but some inconvenience and delay should be expected. We will all do our best to keep you informed. Thor Simon On behalf of the System Administration team of the NetBSD Foundation, Inc.