Availability of Services during the 2013/2014 CERN annual closure
General Services:
As every year, all the services provided by the GS Department requiring a human presence (such as the CERN hotel, car sharing service, shuttle service, etc.) will cease during the annual closure. Services that do not depend on continuous human presence will remain available.
Support levels are reduced during this period. In general, the target reaction time for problems will be half a day (not guaranteed). In the event of failure, the reaction time for restoration of services depends on the arrangements that have been made on a service-by-service basis.
Service outages will be documented on the status board.
For more detailed information please consult the service portal.
Please also note that this year heating will not be cut, but will be switched to an energy-saving mode. This reduced level is equal to weekend operation and should be relatively comfortable.
Computing Services:
Most of the services provided by the IT Department - including WLCG production services - will remain available during the CERN annual closure. No interruptions are scheduled but in the event of failure, the restoration of services cannot be guaranteed.
Problems will be dealt with on a best-effort basis only. However, please note:
- Experts should be reachable to start investigations on the following services within about half a day, except around Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (24 and 25 December) and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day (31 December and 1 January): Databases, Linux, lxplus, lxbatch, Mail, Printing, Network & Telecoms, Vidyo, Windows & Windows Terminal Services, account activations, password resets, Castor, EOS, AFS, CDS, Indico, Inspire, Twiki, SVN, CVS, issue tracking, Dashboard Monitoring Service, CERN Grid Services, and the room booking system. Incidents will be documented at http://cern.ch/itssb.
- All network and telecom services will run as usual. The first-line support will operate normally, but no change requiring human intervention will be possible.
- The back-up service will remain operational, but back-ups cannot be guaranteed and file restores may not be possible.
- For the Castor service, damaged tapes will not be processed.
Please note that the operator service to which urgent problems may be addressed will be maintained throughout and can be reached at 75011 or computer.operations@cern.ch.
Potential computer security incidents should be reported to Computer.Security@cern.ch or 70500 as usual.
Please note that the Service Desk will be closed but can be reached at 77777 and calls will be redirected to the appropriate support groups.
Please remember to shut down and power off any equipment in your office that is not required during the annual closure.
