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Campus Computing News
Y2K Rollover Plans
Although we are confident that our systems will
survive unscathed, the Computing Center is finalizing its
plans to make sure that all of the critical information
technology elements on campus are operational following
the advent of the new year. Many staff members will be on
campus to check on systems when the clock rolls over to
the year 2000 at 12:01 on Saturday, January 1 and to
begin corrective action if we encounter problems. We
expect that many faculty, staff, and students will be
trying out our systems shortly after the new year, so
here's what you can expect:
- The mainframe (both the
administrative and academic partitions) will be
shut down at 5:00 PM on Friday, December 31st and
will be restarted at 1:00 AM on Saturday, January
1. You will not have access to the mainframe
during that eight hour period, therefore, and you
should expect the reboot to take up to an hour.
Full pack backups of both the academic and
administrative partitions will be done prior to
the shutdown of the mainframe. The shutdown is
planned for 5:00 p.m. on Friday, December 31st.
Backups for the academic partition will be taken
from approximately 11:00 p.m. on Thursday,
December 30 until approximately 5:00 p.m. on
Friday, December 31. Backups of the
administrative partition will be taken from
approximately 6:00 a.m. on Friday, December 31
until approximately 5:00 p.m. on Friday, December
31. The individual mainframe partitions will not
be accessible while the backups are being taken,
and will remain unavailable until approximately
2:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 1, 2000. Messages
will be sent to each system (academic and
administrative) prior to the actual start time of
system backups.
- The Computing Center will have staff on
campus at 12:01 on January 1st to check
the operation of the electrical, water, data
communications, and telephone systems. Both on-
and off-campus access to our computers will be
tested.
- We will be checking the
operation of the central Web server (www.unt.edu) and
our mail systems (GroupWise and the student
Internet mail system), starting at 12:01.
- The Helpdesk (ISB 119, x2324)
will be staffed starting at 7:00 AM on Saturday,
January 1 through 6:00 that day, and from 7:45
until approximately 3:00 on Sunday, January
2nd. Questions about the status of systems
can be directed to the Helpdesk, which will also
serve as a central "sneaker net"
communications hub if all forms of electronic
messaging are inoperative.
- Computing Center Administrative Computing
employees will perform preliminary checks of the central
administrative systems (Student Records,
Financial Data, Human Resources, etc.) starting
at 10:00 on Saturday, January 1st. That
afternoon, various end-user departments will have
personnel on campus to check those systems for
proper functioning.
Keep in mind ...
It's important to us that our users are aware of steps
that they can take to minimize the impact of the Year
2000 rollover on themselves and the campus.*
Here is a short list of things to keep in mind:
- Your telephone system at home may be unable to
give you a dial tone at 12:01 because everyone
will be picking up the handset to see if it's
working. So don't assume that the phone system is
broken: it just may be overloaded. Wait until
after sunrise on Saturday to check your phone!
- As noted above, we'll have staff on campus
checking the systems you're going to expect to
use when you get back to work on Monday, January
3rd. You can probably wait until Sunday to report
any problems you have with getting connected to
UNT since it's likely we'll be working on the
problem before you notice it.
* Other articles on Y2K concerns can
be read in this issue. See:
You might also want to take a look at these articles
that appeared in last month's Benchmarks Online:
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