Multi-day FABRIC maintenance (January 1-5, 2024)

Dear experimenters, 

FABRIC will have a multi-day maintenance in the first week of January 2024. This maintenance will be performed to replace the dataplane switches at 4 sites and update the control software to the next version (release 1.6). 

Work will be disruptive on the four sites that will receive new dataplane switches (STAR, WASH, LOSA, NEWY). Unfortunately, we will have to delete all slivers on these sites in order to integrate the new switches. Slivers will not be recovered after the maintenance, therefore all data should be backed up. (Your SSH keys, data on persistent volumes and experiment notebooks will remain unaffected.) These 4 sites will be placed in pre-maintenance mode several days in advance so that no new experiments can be created after the indicated date. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. 

On other sites, slices will continue running, and slivers will be accessible during the maintenance, however, we will place the testbed in maintenance mode between Jan 1-5, therefore it will not be possible to perform slice operations (create, extend, delete). If expiration dates of the active slivers fall within the maintenance period and they should be extended, extensions should be done before Jan 1st. 

Due to the dataplane switch replacements and fiber work on the 4 (core) sites, dataplane connectivity across other sites will be interrupted occasionally during the maintenance. 

Additional information and updates about the upcoming maintenance will be announced on this thread. In order to receive email notifications, subscribing to this thread is suggested as well as periodically checking the page online will be beneficial to view the updates.