University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory - Notice history

We believe that Mimecast has unblocked us.

There are some unrelated issues with some mailing lists still under investigation, not connected in any way (as far as we know) with the Mimecast problem; if you experience any more problems please contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk.

We believe that UIS has successfully worked around this issue, and email sent to mailing lists from departmental addresses should now work.

However, we now also believe that this was a symptom of a broader problem with email to one particular email anti-spam service provider, Mimecast. Email to other institutions which also use Mimecast may also be affected. We are working on getting this resolved.

If you do encounter the issue, you may be able to get email through successfully by sending from an @cam.ac.uk address.

As a workaround, messages should get through if you send mail using Outlook from your @cam.ac.uk address to the relevant internal @lists.cam.ac.uk address for the mailing list; if you don't know what that address is for a particular list, contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk.

Personal dev-gpu / dev-cpu VMs can now be started via Xen Orchestra.

Some VMs may need some maintenance in order to start:

• VMs that were running during the incident may have unclean filesystems that need a repair. Generally you will see the boot process end with "(initramfs)" on the console. Contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk for help.

• VMs that have not been booted for a long time may need a manual update to /etc/fstab. If your VM appears to start but you have no home directory or your home directory is read-only, either run "sudo cl-update-system" then reboot, or contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk for help.

The shared servers dev-gpu-1 and dev-cpu-1 will be unavailable for a little while longer.

Access to GPU cluster home directories and scratch space has been restored using the new storage server; these are accessible from Lab-managed Linux systems outside the GPU VM cluster via /anfs/gpucluster/$USER and /anfs/gpuscratch respectively. You can access this data via SSH to slogin.cl.cam.ac.uk.

dev-gpu-acs will be available shortly, for ACS students' use only.

GPU/CPU development VMs and the shared servers dev-gpu-1 and dev-cpu-1 remain unavailable; copying their VM disks will take longer. They should be restored to service later this evening.

Please do not attempt to start or stop any dev-gpu or dev-cpu VM at this time. It won't be successful, and might cause your VM to get into a more broken state.

As the GPU cluster is currently unusable anyway due to a fault with the temporary storage server, and we have a replacement storage server ready to go into service, we will take this opportunity to migrate data to the new server. This may take a few hours.

We believe that no data has been lost. The temporary storage is functioning, but the NFS service is not.

This issue is now also affecting clients which already have the filesystem mounted. They may see a permission error. Most dev-gpu/dev-cpu VMs have probably frozen as they can no longer access their disks.