System/Network Maintenance and Incident Report

September 4, 2011 (Sunday) 00:00 to 08:00 - Maintenance for the HKUCC.hku.hk Email Server

System hardware replacement work for the HKUCC.hku.hk system will be carried on September 4, 2011 and the downtime schedule is from 00:00 to 08:00 September 4, 2011. The long downtime is necessary because we are moving HKUCC.hku.hk to a new hardware system.

All HKUCC.hku.hk services will become unavailable, which include webmail to HKUCC, MyEmail of HKU Portal (if the users are still using HKUCC email account), and login to the HKUCC system.

If you have any enquiry, please contact our Help Desk at 2859-2480 or email us at ithelp@hku.hk.

August 4, 2011 (Thursday) - Service Interruption on Several Services

There was an unplanned service interruption which affected the following services for a short period of time (from 4:33 - 4:45 pm) on August 4, 2011:

- HKU WWW main webpages
- Central Authentication Service (CAS) affecting HKU Portal access
- JUPAS CMS webpage system
- ITS Service Desk System
- FMIS video streaming service

Immediate action has been taken to rectify the problem and all affected services were resumed at 4:45 pm on August 4, 2011.

April 11, 2011 (Monday) 7am-8am - Suspension of HKU Portal system

A new HKU Portal for staff will be launched on April 11, 2011. There will be a black-out period of the HKU Portal on April 11 from 7a.m. to 8a.m. to make way for the change. During this period, HKU Portal system will be temporarily inaccessible.

The new HKU Portal for staff, to be effective from 8a.m. on April 11, will be the gateway for accessing the Human Capital Management System (HCMS). Please direct enquiries on HCMS to the HCM Helpdesk by phone (3549 5678) or by email (AskHCM@hku.hk), and enquiries on the new HKU Portal or other IT services to the ITS Helpdesk by phone (2859 2480) or email (ithelp@hku.hk).

February 16, 2011 (Wednesday) - Maintenance of HKU Portal system

The Computer Centre will conduct an urgent system maintenance of HKU Portal system from 9:00pm to 10:30pm on February 16.

During this period, the following HKU Portal services will be temporarily inaccessible.

For Staff:
- MyUIS, including the SIS Services for Staff
- MyDepartment
- Services
- MyFavourite

For Students:

- MyFaculty
- My Page -> Other HKU Portal Services-> Services
- My Page -> Other HKU Portal Services -> MyFavourite

Feburary 12-13, 2011 (Saturday-Sunday) - Maintenance Windows for Central Services

For details, refer to http://www.itservices.hku.hk/sysmt/schedule.html

December 21, 2010 (Tuesday) - Maintenance of Blackboard WebCT system for e-learning

The following maintenance period of the Blackboard WebCT system for e-learning is scheduled:

Date: 21 December 2010 (Tuesday)
Time: 7:00 a.m. to 8:30a.m.

WebCT service would be suspended.  A system patch supplied by the WebCT vendor will be installed to address the Java Run Time (JRE) incompatibility issue in file upload to WebCT.

If there is any issue after the scheduled period, please email to ecourse@hku.hk.

Annual Maintenance Windows for 2011

December 5-6, 2010 (Sunday-Monday) - Interruption of SPMSERV system service due to system vulnerability

A system vulnerability of the SMPSERVE (also known as BIOINFO1) system was identified on December 5, 2010 (Sunday) and all affected users were informed. The system was restored and service resumed at 2p.m. on December 6, 2010 (Monday).

September 17, 2010 (Friday) - WebCT service not available

The WebCT learning management system has suffered a failure and was identified around 10a.m. this morning. Steps had been taken to try to restore the corrupted database tables but not unsuccessful.

The whole WebCT database is being restored from backup media. It is expected to take more than 8 hours to restore and rebuild the database.

We shall inform our users by email when the WebCT system is back to normal.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

September 6-8, 2010 (Monday-Wednesday) - Slow performance of HKU Portal

The response of the HKU Portal for staff has been degrading since this Monday (September 6, 2010) due to heavy loading at the start of a new academic year. The affected services include applications under MyUIS, MyDepartment, Services and MyFavourites tabs which are intermittently inaccessible.

While we are working to fix the problem by redistributing the system loading to other machines, if you experience slow response while you click the affected tabs under HKU Portal, please try again later (after 10 minutes). Please do not click the HKU Portal tabs repeatedly as this will add extra loading on the system.

June 27, 2010 (Sunday) - Maintenance affecting email & Internet services

The Computer Centre schedules maintenance on 27 June 2010 (Sunday) to carry out upgrade of our equipment supporting various services. The following services are affected:

(1) The Central Email Service for Staff

Maintenance period: 7:30am to 5:30pm

Service impact:

(a) Access to Central Email Service for Staff will be interrupted 2 times at around 7:30am and at noon. Users are advised to avoid accessing email services at around 7:30am and at noon, and save their work frequently to prevent loss of composition of emails during either interruption.

(b) Email Archive service will be suspended from 7:30am to 9:30am. Users will not be able to access archived email during the service suspension.

(2) Webmail Service for HKUSUA/HKUSUC/HKUCC/GRADUATE.HKU.HK users

Maintenance period: 8am to 10am

Service impact: Webmail Service of HKUSUA/HKUSUC/HKUCC/GRADUATE.HKU.HK will be suspended for 2 hours.

(3) Internet Service

Maintenance period: 8am to 10am

Service impact: Internet access will be interrupted 1-2 minutes during the above period.

(4) HKUSAM (HKU Software Asset Management) service

Maintenance period: 12:30pm to 2:30pm

Service impact: HKUSAM service will be suspended during the maintenance period.

April 29, 2010 (Thursday) 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal system software

The Computer Centre schedules the following maintenance period to upgrade the system software supporting the HKU Portal and its related services:

Date: April 29, 2010 (Thursday)
Time: 6:30a.m. to 8:00a.m.

During this period, the HKU Portal will be temporarily inaccessible when the computer systems are restarted.

March 14, 2010 (Sunday) 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. - Interruptions of MyUIS/Student Connect service of HKU Portal

A maintenance period is scheduled on 14 March 2010 (Sunday) from 7a.m. to 10a.m. to replace failed hardware and to upgrade firmware of the system supporting the database for MyUIS and Student Connect applications.

Affected Services: Web applications under the MyUIS or Student Connect tab of HKUPortal will be interrupted at least twice during migration of the service to and from the backup server.

January 11, 2010 (Monday) 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. - Network equipment failure

A network equipment failure at 4a.m. caused slow network response on accessing to HKU Portal and web server.  This was fixed by 1 p.m. 

January 8, 2010 (Friday) 1:20 p.m. to 2:20 p.m. - Disk Failure of HKUCC.HKU.HK Email Server

Due to disk failure of the HKUCC email server, the rebuilding of the mirrored disks took place from 1:20p.m. to 2:20p.m. The system response was affected, especially for those users with large INBOX (over 100MB). In addition, we received several reports from users using email client programs with POP3 settings about receiving duplicated emails. This was a result of the incident and the POP3 email client programs downloaded the email messages more than once.

December 24, 2009 (Thursday) 5:30a.m. to 12:00 noon - Maintenance of equipment supporting the network, student email and HKUEMS services

A maintenance period is scheduled on 24 Dec 2009 (Thursday) to carry out preventive maintenance to upgrade our equipment supporting the network, student email and HKUEMS (Event Management System) services. 

The details are as follows:

(1) Internet Firewall Upgrade
-----------------------------
Time: 8:00a.m. to noon

Impact: Intermittent interruption of the Internet access (several minutes for several times during the above period)

(2) Exchange Email for Students
------------------------------
Time: 5:30a.m. to 10:30a.m.

Impact: The student email service will be suspended during the above period.

(3) HKUEMS
-----------------------------
Time: 5:30a.m. to 6:30a.m.

Impact: The HKUEMS service will be suspended during the above
period.

The nature of the work is:
(1) Upgrade of firmware of the Internet firewall.
(2) Upgrade of storage array firmware and patch upgrade of the
servers supporting the student email service.
(3) Swapping of power supplies from the ageing Uninterruptible Power
Supply unit for the HKUEMS system.

If you encounter any problems in accessing the services after the maintenance period, please contact our Computer Room by phone 28592496.

For enquiry in office hours, please email our electronic helpdesk ithelp@hku.hk or contact our Helpdesk at Room RR-104 (phone: 28592480).

December 20, 2009 (Sunday) 5:30a.m. to 12:00 noon - Upgrade of HKUESD System

The computer server HKUESD.hku.hk will be upgraded and its web-based applications will be migrated to run on the new system on December 20, 2009 (coming Sunday) from 5:30a.m. to 12:00 noon. During the captioned upgrade period, all the applications running on the HKUESD system would not be accessible and these include the following commonly used ones:

• Sports facilities booking
• Amenities facilities booking
• Performance Review and Development (PRD)
• Performance Review and Staff Development (PRSD)
• Annual/Long Leave System
• Research Outputs System

If you encounter any problems in accessing the applications after the captioned upgrade period, please contact our Computer Room by phone 2859 2496.

October 4, 2009 (Sunday) 7:30a.m-9:00a.m - Maintenance of server supporting Student Connect

The Computer Centre schedules the following maintenance period for the replacement of power supply units of the server system supporting Student Connect and other related services:

Date: Oct 4, 2009 (Sunday)
Time: 7:30a.m. to 9:00a.m.

During this period, the affected services will be temporarily interrupted to allow services transferred from the active server to its backup server and vice versa.

September 1, 2009 (Tuesday) 12a.m-1a.m - HARNET-Internet Connection Upgrade

The HARNET-Internet connection will be upgraded from the current 840Mbps to 1.2Gbps during the above period. Normal Internet access should not be affected during this period.

Should you encounter any network connection problems after the scheduled period, please report them to our Computer Room (Tel: 28592496).

August 17, 2009 (Monday) 02:30pm - Degraded Internet performance due to cable outage of HARNET ISP (PCCW)

HARNET service provider (PCCW) had informed that one of its submarine telecommunications cable system (RNAL-REACH North Asia Loop) was down at around 2:30pm today, causing degraded Internet performance to HARNET institutions.

PCCW further informed that the problem has been generally fixed with re-route of the affected circuit to alternative cable path since 4:28am 18-AUG-2009.  Since then, the HARNET-Internet service was observed back to normal traffic level gradually.

We will continue to monitor closely and work with PCCW to ensure complete service restoration.

August 13, 2009 (Thursday) Temporary suspension of ACEnet/Wifi printing

There is software problem in the ACEnet/Wifi print server. The ACEnet/Wifi printing is temporarily suspended. The service will be resumed as soon as possible.

During the suspension period, please login at the PCs in the central PC Laboratories to use the central printing service.

Update: The ACEnet/Wifi printing is resumed normal on 17 August 2009.

July 30, 2009 (Thursday) 10:55am - 11:15am - Intermittent Network Connection

One of the network backbone switches was found to carry out unexpected recalculation of the network topology, causing instability in the backbone network. The backbone switch resumed normal service after it finished the process of recalculation at 11:15am.

Users may have noticed sluggish network response or experienced intermittent disconnection during the period. We are now working closely with the vendor to monitor the network and to further investigate the problem.

July 26, 2009 (Sunday) - Maintenance of systems supporting Student Connect, Extranet, HKUSUC E-mail, PC Lab printing services

The Computer Centre schedules the following maintenance period to upgrade system software for servers supporting the Student Connect, Extranet, HKUSUC E-mail, PC Lab printing services:

Date: July 26, 2009 (Sunday)
Time: 6:30a.m. to 9:30a.m.

During this period, the above affected services will be temporarily suspended or unavailable.

June 28, 2009 (Sunday) - Maintenance of WWW & SAN storage systems

The Computer Centre schedules the following maintenance period to upgrade system software of the WWW servers supporting the Unviersity home pages and the firmware of central SAN storage systems.

Date: June 28, 2009 (Sunday)
Time: 7:00a.m. to 2:00p.m.

During the period from 7:00a.m. to 10:00a.m., there will be service interruptions of the WWW/WWW3.hku.hk services for a few minutes during the services failover between the standby systems.

June 21, 2009 (Sunday) - Maintenance of systems supporting HKU Portal

There will be a scheduled maintenance to upgrade system software and hardware for servers supporting the HKU Portal and its related services on 21 June 2009 (Sunday) 6:30a.m. to 10a.m.

During this period, the HKU Portal and services under the MyUIS tab may be temporarily inaccessible when the computer systems are restarted.

June 19, 2009 (Friday) 9:15a.m. - 10:15a.m. - Intermittent Network Connection Problem to Server Computers

Intermittent network connection problem to server computers was found to occur at 9:15 a.m. on June 19, 2009, and it affected various services such as HKU Portal and email.  After extensive trouble-shooting with the help from vendor, it was found that the problem was caused by huge traffic volume on the server computer network segments.  After one of the resilient switch ports was shut down, network connections resumed normal from 10:00 a.m. onward, and applications running on host computers resumed service gradually after 10:15 a.m.  We are now working closely with the vendor to monitor the network and to further investigate the problem.

May 9, 2009 (Saturday) - Central User Authentication Server Failure

Owing to the failure of a central user authentication server from 3 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. on May 9, 2009,

• all HKUSUA users were unable to login and all emails for those users received at the HKUSUA email server during the period had been bounced back to the sender;
• the MyLibrary tab under the HKUPortal was not accessible from 3:00am to 10:00am;
• some users failed to login HKU Portal from 3:00am to 10:00am.

The services were back to normal after the failed server was fixed.

April 16, 2009 (Thursday) - Disk Failure of HKUCC.HKU.HK Email Server

A double-disk failure occurred at around 2:20pm on April 16, 2009. The failed disks were rebuilt by the SAN systems by 3:10pm. No data has been lost due to this failure. Users with email directories located on the failed disk volume would experience login problem from 2:20pm to 3:10pm. Other users might experience slow email access when heavy disk activities took place during the disk rebuilt process.

January 31, 2009 (Saturday) - Maintenance of Disk Storage Systems

There will be a scheduled maintenance on our Storage Area Network on 31 January 2009 (Saturday) from 7:30a.m. - 8:30a.m.

During the maintenance period, there should not be any service interruption except that the computer systems supporting the following services may give slower response.

  - HKU Portal services
  - MyWebCT e-course services
  - Getting IP address
  - Exchange Email and Calendar for Staff

December 28, 2008 (Sunday) - Maintenance of HKU Portal and Network Equipment

There will be a scheduled maintenance work on systems supporting HKU Portal as well as central network equipment to enhance the overall system and network security and resilience on 28 Dec 2008 (Sunday) from 6:00a.m. to 11:00a.m. 

During this period, all HKU Portal services will be temporarily suspended to facilitate the above re-configuration works.  While network connectivity and Internet access will remain normal, there may be occasional interruptions during the periods from 7:30a.m. to 8:00a.m. and from 9:00a.m. to 9:30a.m.

October 19, 2008 (Sunday) - Maintenance of Email Servers

There will be a maintenance schedule on October 19, 2008 (Sunday) from 7a.m. - 8 a.m. to re-configure the central email servers for better performance.

During this period, all the email services for staff, students and graduates, including MyEmail of HKU Portal, webmail.hku.hk, IMAP & POP3 services, will be temporarily suspended. Email sent to the central email servers will be received after the maintenance period.

September 28, 2008 (Sunday) - Backup Generator Testing for Computer Room of Computer Centre

The Estates Office has scheduled to carry out the backup generator testing to verify supply of emergency power to the Computer Room in Run Run Shaw Building on coming Sunday, 28 September 2008 between 07:00 - 09:00. Normal electricity supply to the Computer Room will be interrupted but there is no service interruption anticipated unless a major equipment failure occured on the electrical power system.

September 19, 2008 (Friday) - Maintenance of Student Connect & Extranet Systems

There will be a maintenance schedule on September 19, 2008 (Friday) from 6p.m. to 8p.m. to address a software error identified on the operating system of the computer systems supporting the Student Connect system and web-based "Extranet" applications involving outside parties, e.g. Alumni services and online payment:

During the period, users are advised not to access Student Connect and course-related applications via HKU Portal and the extranet applications, e.g. Alumni services and online payment.

Technically, there will be 3 service interruptions in rebooting the computer systems as scheduled below:

(1) 6:00p.m. - 6:10p.m.
(2) 6:50p.m. - 7:00p.m.
(3) 7:40p.m. - 7:50p.m.

September 8, 2008 (Monday) - Maintenance of HKU Portal Server

To alleviate the slow performance in accessing HKU Portal at certain occasions, memory upgrade for the database server supporting the HKU Portal will be carried out by the vendor engineer on September 8, 2008 (Monday) from 6:30p.m.- 7:30p.m.

During the period, the HKU Portal services will be interrupted twice during the following time slots:

(1) 6:30p.m. - 6:40p.m.
(2) 7:20p.m. - 7:30p.m.

Please avoid carrying out HKU Portal activities during the above period.

September 2, 2008 (Tuesday) - Authentication server database corrupted

The authentication server supporting the HKU Portal and Laboratory PC authentication was found not responding around 3p.m. and caused access problem to HKU Portal and Laboratory PCs running Windows XP.  Upon investigation, the authentication server database was found corrupted.  The database was recovered and all services resumed by 5p.m.

September 1, 2008 (Monday) - Heavy loading of HKU Portal servers and databases

The HKU Portal servers and databases were heavily loaded in certain periods during office hours.  Slow response time or sometimes time-out of web connection was resulted.

August 14, 2008 (Thursday) - Campus Network Returns to Normal

With reference to the notice posted on August 13, 2008 on the recent slow network performance caused by on-line viewing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, we would like to inform our users that we have proceeded to block the video traffic generated by such viewing at a number of locations where traffic was found to be particularly heavy.  These locations include buildings on the Main Campus, Sassoon Rd. Campus, Queen Mary Hospital campus and the HKU Cyberport offices.

It is hoped that with this measure, we can better ensure an adequate bandwidth for normal computing functions of the University.

August 13, 2008 (Wednesday) - Slow Response of Campus Network

We have received enquiries and complaints on the sluggish performance of the campus network since Monday 11 August 2008. By analyzing the types of network traffic bandwidth, we find that the campus network has become extremely heavily loaded in certain occasions due to video streams to/from user computers for viewing the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

We would like to request our users to be considerate and refrain from downloading the excessive video streams/TV programmes, especially during office hours, so that normal network functions of the University will not be affected.

August 3, 2008 (Sunday) 1:00p.m. - 5:00p.m. - Scheduled Maintenance of Webmail for HKUSUA and HKUSUC

To faciliate upgrade of the central Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure, there will be a scheduled maintenance exercise to upgrade the firmware of the SAN switches on 3 August (Sunday) from 13:00 to 17:00. During the period, the webmail services will be interrupted twice during the periods:

(1) 1:00p.m. - 1:15p.m.
(2) 4:30p.m. - 4:45p.m.

Users are advised to suspend mail activities using HKU Portal or webmail.hku.hk during the above two periods.

July 20 , 2008 (Sunday) 5:30 a.m. to July 21 , 2008 (Monday) 6:30 a.m.- Electrical work in Run Run Shaw (RRS) Building & PC Lab in RRS closed

The Estates Office has scheduled to carry out major replacement works on the Electrical Main Switch Board of Run Run Shaw Building commencing on coming Sunday, 20 July 2008. Electricity supply to Run Run Shaw Building will be suspended from 6:00 a.m. 20 July 2008 to 6:00 a.m. 21 July 2008 and there will be no lighting, air-conditioning or lift service.

Special arrangements will be made by the Estates Office to provide emergency power supply to the Computer Room in Room 108 of Run Run Shaw Building for maintaining normal services of the campus network and central computer servers.

Due to suspension of electricity supply, the PC laboratories in Room 103 & Room 104 and ACEnet laboratory in Room 113 of Run Run Shaw Building will be closed in the following period:

5:30 a.m. 20 July 2008 to 6:30 a.m. 21 July 2008

During the period, the PC laboratory in Room 134 of Library Building Old Wing will be open instead to provide the laboratory PC and printing services to our users.

July 6, 2008 (Sunday) 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. - Electrical work in Run Run Shaw (RRS) Building & PC Lab in RRS closed

Estates Office has scheduled to carry out measurement on the Electrical Main Switch Board of Run Run Shaw Building on coming Sunday, 6 July 2008, in preparation for major electrical replacement works later. Electricity supply to Run Run Shaw Building will be suspended from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and there will be no lighting, air-conditioning or lift service.

Special arrangements will be made by the Estates Office to provide emergency power supply to the Computer Room in Room 108 of Run Run Shaw Building for maintaining normal services of the campus network and central computer servers.

Due to suspension of electricity supply, the PC laboratories in Room 103 & Room 104 and ACEnet laboratory in Room 113 of Run Run Shaw Building will be closed in the following period:

5:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. coming Sunday (6 July)

During the period, the PC laboratory in Room 134 of Library Building Old Wing will be open instead to provide the laboratory PC and printing services to our users.

June 29, 2008 (Sunday) 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. - Suspension of HKU Portal UIS service

The UIS computer applications accessible via "MyUIS" tab of HKU Portal will be suspended on 29 June 2008 (Sunday) from 7 a.m. - 9 a.m. due to maintenance of the related computer servers:

May 8, 2008 (Thursday) 2:00 p.m. - 2:50 p.m. - Backbone Network Equipment Problem

The backbone network equipment of the campus network failed at 2:00p.m. Network connections on the campus network were affected. Our colleagues have taken measures immediately to tackle the problem and restore the network connections of the campus network by 2:50p.m. The engineer of the equipment supplier checked the equipment afterward for postmortem analysis.

April 27, 2008 (Sunday) 6:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal

There will be a scheduled maintenance for the HKU Portal and its related systems, including Student Connect and UIS on 27 April 2008 (Sunday) from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.

During the maintenance period, the Oracle database management software will be updated and the HKU Portal and all related services would temporarily be inaccessible.

March 26, 2008 (Wednesday) 8:50a.m. to 2:30p.m. - Network Connection Problem at the university network at Queen Mary Hospital premises

Report of network connection problem was received at 8:50a.m. It was found that there was heavy network port scanning and broadcast network traffic problem in the university network at Queen Mary Hospital premises. At 10:30a.m. the problem was isolated at the first to third floors of New Clinical Building. After disconnecting this part of the network from the network backbone, the QMH network resumed normal. It was later found that the problem was likely to be triggered by a virus-infected departmental PC/server. We are working with the department involved to prevent recurrence of the problem.

February 14, 2008 (Thursday) 4:45p.m. to 7:15p.m. - Backbone Network Equipment Problem

The backbone network equipment of the campus network failed at 4:45p.m. Network connections on the campus network were affected. Our colleagues and the engineer of the equipment supplier immediately tackled the problem together. By 5:50p.m., most of the network connections on the main campus were resumed. By 7:15p.m., the network connections on other parts of the campus network were resumed.

February 3, 2008 (Sunday) 8:00a.m. to 9:00a.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal

To improve the HKU Portal service availability, we shall upgrade its database management software on February 3, 2008 (Sunday) from 8:00am to 9:00am.

During the maintenance period, all services of the HKU Portal would not be accessible.

January 30, 2008 (Wednesday) 11:40a.m. to 3:15p.m. - Intermittent Connection Problem to HKU Portal

Intermittent failure of access to HKU Portal services was found to occur at 11:40a.m.   The HKU Portal servers and the network paths were examined and traced.   Eventually an infected PC in Knowles Building was located which attacked the network by doing network port scanning and imposing high loading on a firewall and caused slow response of the HKU Portal servers.   After the PC was isolated from the campus network, computer network connections to the servers became normal.

January 8, 2008 (Tuesday) 10:30a.m. to 1:00p.m. - Electricity Supply Fault in Computer Room

The Main Electricity Switch in the Computer Room failed at around 10:30a.m.   As a result, functions of many computer servers and network equipment stopped at around 11:25a.m. when the batteries of the three UPS (Un-interruptible Power Supply) had gone empty.   Most of the central IT and network services are affected.

The failed Switch was repaired by Estates Office's electricians at around 12:35p.m.   The network and central computer services were resumed soon afterwards.

January 1, 2008 (Tuesday) 2:45p.m. to 6:55p.m. - Cooling System and UPS Failed in Computer Room

Two UPS (Un-interruptible Power Supply) units in the Computer Room failed at around 2:45p.m.   This failure had led to interruption of Internet connectivity of the University for about 30 minutes.   The services of the Dragon HKU Library Catalogue System and the Windows HPC cluster were also affected for about an hour.

The UPS problem was triggerred by failure of the Computer Room's cooling system that occurred at around 1p.m. (The Estate Office staff was called to fix the cooling system.)   The engineer of the UPS supplier has found that a number of fuse units of the UPS units were burned.   The affected network and computer systems had been running on city electricity supply directly until 6:55p.m. on the same day when normal function of the UPS units were restored.

December 31, 2007 (Monday) 1:15p.m. to 1:30p.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal & UIS system

In order to fix software bugs identified recently by the vendors, the Computer Centre will update the system software of the servers supporting the HKU Portal and University Information System (UIS) on December 31, 2007 (Monday) from 1:15p.m. to 1:30p.m.

During the maintenance period, all services of the HKU Portal and UIS would not be accessible.

December 22, 2007 (Saturday) 6:30a.m. to 8:30a.m. - Maintenance of Student Connect and Extranet systems

In order to fix software bugs identified recently by the vendors, the Computer Centre will update the system software of the servers supporting the Student Connect and Extranet systems on December 22, 2007 (Saturday) from 6:30a.m. to 8:30a.m.

During the maintenance period, the Student Connect and Extranet services would be inaccessible.

November 25, 2007 (Sunday) 6:30a.m. to 9:30a.m. - Maintenance of the UIS, HKUSUA and GRADUATE systems

Maintenance work on the UIS, HKUSUA and GRADUATE systems will be carried out on November 25, 2007 (Sunday) from 6:30a.m. to 9:30a.m.

During this period, the following services will be temporarily inaccessible:
- "MyUIS" functions of HKU Portal
- HKUSUA email services and printing in PC laboratories
- Graduate email Services

October 17, 2007 (Wednesday) to October 20, 2007 (Saturday) - Graduate Email Server Login Problem

There was a software problem in the Graduate email server. It caused some user login problem on October 17-20, 2007.

October 7, 2007 (Sunday) 6:30a.m. to 9:30a.m. - Maintenance of HKUAP

The "MyUIS" functions of HKU Portal will be closed temporarily during the period of 6:30-9:30 a.m. on 7 October, 2007 (Sunday) from 6:30a.m. to 9:30a.m. for maintenance of the related computer servers. Other HKU Portal services will not be affected.

September 30, 2007 (Sunday) 2a.m. to 1p.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal

In order to allow maintenance and upgrade of the computer servers that support access management of HKU Portal and its MyUIS services, the HKU Portal system will be closed on September 30, 2007 (Sunday) from 2a.m. to 1p.m..

All services provided through HKU Portal will be inaccessible during the maintenance period. Webmail service will continue to be supported. Please visit the webpage: http://webmail.hku.hk for using webmail during the above HKU Portal Maintenance period.

September 19, 2007 (Wednesday) 9a.m. to 4p.m. - Intermittent Network Access Problem in Sassoon Road Campus

There was intermittent network access problem in Sassoon Road Campus from 9a.m. After extensive on-site trouble-shooting by our colleagues, two sources causing the problem were identified: a failed network switch and a mis-configured and virus-laden PC which scanned the network and slowed down the network. The problem was finally resolved at 4p.m. and normal network connection was resumed.

August 28, 2007 (Tuesday) 2:45p.m. to 3:45p.m. - HKU Portal and Laboratory PC Login and Email Sending Problems

There was a system outage from 2:45p.m. to 3:45p.m. today. This caused login problem in the HKU Portal and the PC Laboratories as well as errors in sending emails using the mail.hku.hk email server. The problem was due to a system configuration error after a system patch installation on one of the cluster computer nodes.

August 25, 2007 (Saturday) 10:00a.m. to 10:55a.m. - Internet Access Failure

The Internet connectivity of the University failed between 10:00-10:55 a.m. today. It was due to a fault of the power supply to the newly installed Internet gateway equipment when a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) in our Computer Room was being maintained and the equipment concerned was not yet supported by redundant power supply. Installation of redundant supply through separate UPS units for the equipment is under way for avoiding recurrence of the problem.

August 24, 2007 (Friday) 9:00a.m. to 1:30p.m. - Internet Access Problem

Users at several locations reported problem in accessing Internet sites at around 9a.m. today. It was due to the following incidents:

(1) Internet slowness
- The slowness was due to high CPU usage of TippingPoint (TP04), an intrusion detection device.
- The TP04 had been by-passed at around 10:30a.m.

(2) ACENET/Hallnet DHCP problem
- Caused by IP address conflict in hall network. (It was traced that some user computer's IP address was set to be the same as our hall router's IP address.)
- The network switch port of the source of abuse was blocked at around 1:30p.m.

We are pleased to report that the HARNET Upgrade had been implemented successfully and all services resumed normal by 4:00a.m. on Sunday, August 19.

The Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC) will implement an upgrade for HARNET which supports HKU's Internet connectivity on coming Sundays. The work schedules are as follows:

(1) August 12 (Sunday) 3:00-5:00 a.m.
(2) August 19 (Sunday) 3:00-5:00 a.m.

In the process during the above periods, installation of HARNET router equipment needs to be relocated from the existing provider to a new provider. While the Computer Centre would do its best in keeping the Internet service unaffected, certain intermittent service interruption during the service period might occur. Users are therefore advised to avoid using Internet during the above periods, if it is possible.

Should you encounter any network connection problems after the scheduled periods, please report them to our Computer Room (Tel: 28592496).

July 28, 2007 (Sunday) 7:30a.m. to 8:00a.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal & UIS system

A system maintenance on the computer server supporting the University Information System (UIS) and other applications is scheduled on Saturday (28 July 2007) in the morning from 7:30a.m. to 8:00a.m.

During this period, the HKU Portal and all related services, including the following will be temporarily inaccessible:
- All services under the MyUIS, MyDepartment, Services and
- MyFavourites tabs of HKU Portal
- University Information System (UIS)

July 22, 2007 (Sunday) 7:00a.m. to 7:30a.m. - Maintenance of HKU Portal & UIS system

A system maintenance on the computer server supporting the University Information System (UIS) and other applications is scheduled on 22 July 2007 (Sunday) from 7:00a.m. to 7:30a.m.

During this period, the HKU Portal and all related services, including the following will be temporarily inaccessible:
- University Information System (UIS)
- All services under the MyUIS, MyDepartment, Services and MyFavourites tabs of HKU Portal

July 16, 2007 (Monday) 5p.m. to 8:30p.m. - International Internet Access Problem

We discovered slow response to international Internet sites at 5:00p.m.  The HARNET/Internet ISP vendor was called to investigate.  They reported some equipment failure in their internal network.  The local Internet access was not affected.  The problem was rectified by the vendor at 8:30p.m., and the international Internet connection then became normal.

July 7, 2007 (Saturday) 7:45p.m. to 9:45p.m. - Internet Access Problem

There was intermittent Internet access problem from 7:45p.m. The HARNET/Internet ISP vendor was called at once to investigate. After further trouble-shooting by our colleague, it was found that the Internet router at the Computer Centre was not working and the resilient backup mechanism was not functioning properly. The problem was resolved at 9:45p.m. and the Internet connection was then resumed.

June 29, 2007 (Friday) 10:00a.m. to 12:25p.m. - Slowness in Accessing HKU Portal Service

Users reported problem in accessing MyUIS, Departments and Services tab in the HKUPortal at around 10a.m. today. It was due to errors on the firewall server connected between the UIS server and the Portal server. The situation was rectified after the firewall server was rebooted. Access to MyUIS via HKUPortal returned to normal at 12:25p.m.

June 1, 2007 (Friday) 1:20p.m. to 5:20p.m. - Failure of University's administrative application server in the afternoon

One of the disk controllers of the primary administration application server failed at 1:20p.m. UIS and other applications were affected. The faulty disk controller was replaced by the vendor's engineer, the file system was restored, and the services were resumed by 5:20p.m.

March 2, 2007 (Friday) 4p.m. to 6:30p.m. - Problems in Accessing Internet Sites

Users at several locations reported problem in accessing Internet sites at around 4p.m. today. It was due to a problematic configuration of the campus network backbone switches. The situation was rectified after correcting the network configuration. Network traffic returned to normal at 6:30p.m.

February 7, 2007 (Tuesday) 1:30p.m. to 4:30p.m. - Optical fiber links to Chong Yuet Ming Chemistry Building, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building and May Wing broken

The network connections to Chong Yuet Ming Chemistry Building, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building and May Wing failed from 1:30p.m. to 4:30p.m. It was traced that the optical fiber cables from Chong Yuet Ming Amenities Centre to Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building and a pair of optical fiber cables from the Computer Room at Run Run Shaw Building to Chong Yuet Ming Amenities Centre were broken.   The network connections were restored after re-routing the optical fiber cable connections to the premises.

December 30, 2006 (Saturday) 3:00a.m. - Update on Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake

Another update on Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake on December 26, 2006 is provided by HGC, our Internet Service Provider.

They (HGC) have acted to improve the network performance for the JUCC members in the past 24 hours. Access to most Internet sites is recovered though the overall traffic congestion issues still persist. Since 6 of the 7 submarine cable systems are damaged, it is expected that the total recovery time could be 1 week or more.

December 29, 2006 (Friday) 7:30p.m. to 10:00p.m. - Maintenance of HKUESD and administrative application servers

The Computer Centre has scheduled maintainance work for updating Operating System patches of the HKUESD and administrative application servers from 7:30p.m. to 10:00p.m. on December 29, 2006 (Friday).

The services that will be affected are:
(a) Access to the administrative application server, e.g. the terminal-mode applications for administrative offices, will be interrupted from 19:30 to 21:00;
(b) Access to the HKUESD system and its web applications will be interrupted from 19:30 to 22:00.

December 28, 2006 (Thursday) 3:30p.m. - Update on Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake

An update on Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake on December 26, 2006 is provided by HGC, our Internet Service Provider.

1) The Internet services to China is not affected.
2) Internet2 to U.S. has been restored since 5p.m. yesterday (December 27, 2006).
3) Overseas cable carriers are trying to restore the circuit through the spare capacity.
4) HGC has arranged alternative paths to improve network performance and kept on searching for alternative paths for customers. The overall Internet traffic is improving but the congestion issue still persisted.
5) Overseas cable carriers have sent cable ships to restore the damaged submarine cable system. The estimated time for repair is about 7 days.

December 27, 2006 (Wednesday) 6:30p.m. - Update on Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake

HGC has informed the Computer Centre at 17:40 today (December 27, 2006) that there is no further progress on the service level to the Internet, compared with that reported this morning. In fact, HGC has withdrawn their service recovery time of 12 hours stated this morning due to the uncertainty of the problem, and they would not provide any assurance information on the recovery time at this moment.

December 27, 2006 (Wednesday) 11:00a.m. - Internet connection disruption due to Taiwan earthquake

We regret to inform you that the international Internet connection has become very slow or unreachable since last night (December 26, 2006 8:30p.m.). HGC, our Internet Service Provider, has informed us that the problem was due to the earthquake in Taiwan which has caused damage to some overseas carriers' submarine cables. HGC is working to repair the cable, but they expect that it will take another 12 hours to recover the service.

This incident is affecting the international connections only. Local internet connections in Hong Kong are not affected.

We shall keep you updated of the progress when we receive more information from HGC.

December 3, 2006 (Sunday) 6:00a.m. to 10:00a.m.- Upgrade of Internet Firewalls and Computer Systems

The Internet Firewalls, the www.hku.hk system and the WebCT CE6 e-learning system will be upgraded during the period of 6:00a.m. - 10:00a.m. on December 3, 2006 (Sunday).

Services supported by these systems will be temporarily affected.
Details are as follows:

(A) Upgrade of the www.hku.hk server
------------------------------------

Date: 3 December 2006 (Sunday)
Time: 6:00am to 10:00am

Services affected during the above period:
(1) Information updating or data submission through the web pages http://www.hku.hk/... will be temporarily suspended.
(2) Web pages based on php developed by departments or student societies (with web address http://www3.hku.hk/... ) will be temporarily inaccessible.
Note: Information dissemination function through http://www.hku.hk/... will not be affected.

(B) Upgrade of system software of the WebCT CE6 system
------------------------------------------------------

Date: 3 December 2006 (Sunday)
Time: 7:00am to 8:00am

Services affected during the above period:
- The WebCT CE6 service will be temporarily inaccessible.

(C) Upgrade of Internet firewalls
---------------------------------

Date: 3 December 2006 (Sunday)
Time: 7:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m.

Services affected during the above period:
- Internet connection could be interrupted for about 5 minutes during the half-hour window of 7:00-7:30 a.m.

Should you encounter any problem in the access to Internet and to the services of the www.hku.hk and WebCT CE6 systems after the above upgrade periods, please report the cases to our Computer Room (Tel: 28592496).

November 11, 2006 (Saturday) 5:30a.m. to 6:30a.m.- Maintenance Work on the HKUCC.HKU.HK system

The Computer Centre has scheduled maintenance work on the HKUCC.HKU.HK system on this coming Saturday (November 11, 2006) to enable its connection to a new SAN storage array.  The HKUCC.HKU.HK system and its email service will not be available during the above stated maintenance period.

November 5, 2006 (Sunday) 7:00a.m. - 7:20a.m. Network Upgrade Work on High-Availability Internet Firewall

The current Internet firewalls of the Campus Network will be upgraded to more powerful high- availability Internet firewalls with built-in Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) featues during the period of 7:00a.m. - 7:20a.m. on November 5, 2006 (Sunday).

During the above period, performance of HKU's connection to Internet may be affected for some minutes.

November 2, 2006 (Thursday) 11a.m. - 12:30p.m. Campus network connection disruption

Network connections to several buildings were disrupted at about 11a.m. on Novemeber 2, 2006 (Thursday). After extensive trouble-shooting with the vendor, it was suspected that the problem was caused by a malfunctioning core Gigabit Ethernet switch, to which the buildings were connected. Network connections resumed normal from 12:30pm onwards, after the problematic switch was isolated. We are working closely with the vendor to monitor the network and to further investigate the problem.

October 29, 2006 (Sunday) 4:00a.m. - 2:00p.m. Migration of Student Connect and Extranet Systems

The Computer Centre has scheduled the migration of the applications, including Student Connect, running on the S80 & Extranet computer systems to two new computer servers on October 29, 2006 (Sunday). All applications on the S80 & Extranet systems will be suspended from 4a.m. to 2p.m.

October 8, 2006 (Sunday) 6:00a.m. - 9:00a.m. Graduate, HKUESD and Extranet service interruption

The Computer Centre has scheduled system maintenance for the SAN storage array firmware upgrade on October 8, 2006 (Sunday). The services of the systems Graduate, HKUESD and Extranet would be affected as follows:

(a) Access to the Graduate Email and the HKUESD systems will be interrupted from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.
(b) Access to the Extranet services will be interrupted from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

September 17, 2006 (Sunday) 6:50a.m. - 3:10p.m. HKUSUA and ECOURSE service interruption

The Computer Centre has scheduled system maintenance for the HKUSUA and ECOURSE servers on September 17, 2006 (Sunday).  The following services were affected in the following periods, with delay in the starting time:
(a) Access to the HKUSUA system and its email service interrupted from 6:50 a.m. to 7:40 a.m.
(b) Access to the ECOURSE server hosting the web-based courseware (old WebCT CE4.1 version) interrupted from 2:50 p.m. to 3:10 p.m.

September 12, 2006 (Tuesday) 6:45a.m. - 8:30a.m. Internet connection disruption

The Internet connection was very slow from 6:45 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. on September 12. It was traced to be abnormal heavy traffic from the Internet, especially to a computer on the main campus. After blocking the IP addresses of the sources of the heavy traffic at our firewall and blocking the network switch port connecting to the aforementioned computer, the Internet traffic was resumed to a normal state.

September 1, 2006 (Friday) 5p.m. - 6p.m. Network connection problem to HKUCC, HKUSUA and some server systems

Network connection to several server systems, including HKUCC and HKUSUA, was disrupted from 5pm to 6pm on September 1, 2006.  The network connection became unstable as a result of heavy traffic generated by a source on the main campus which affected network equipment.

August 19, 2006 (Saturday) 2p.m. - 9p.m. Migration to WebCT CE6 and Suspension of WebCT Service

The WebCT service will be suspended on August 19, 2006 from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. in order to migrate the existing WebCT courses from the CE4.1 server (ecourse.hku.hk) onto the new CE6 server (webct.hku,hk). The new system is planned to be in production service on August 21, 2006. Details can be found at http://www.itservices.hku.hk/faq/webct/ce6/announce.htm.

August 7, 2006 (Monday) 1:30p.m. - 1:00a.m. Network Incidents had affected HKU Web Service

You might have noticed that the HKU Web Service was very slow on August 7, 2006 starting from about 1:30pm. The heavy loading was initially anticipated as our second-year students were doing their course selection while the hall applications were also underway at the same time. Incidentally someone had connected a wrong cable to the network in one of the classrooms in the Run Run Shaw Building that created a loop in the classroom virtual local area network (VLAN) which had resulted in instability throughout the campus network.

Our colleagues had responded and isolated the network looping problem quite quickly by about 2:30pm, but the web service traffic had already built up and the system response was slow. We had proceeded to implement other measures to help solve the web congestion problems including the deployment of an additional server as a contingency measure.

All the web services had returned to acceptable response by about 1 a.m. on August 8, 2006. We have been monitoring the network and the systems closely on August 8, 2006 and both the system and network performance had returned to acceptable levels.

July 19, 2006 (Wednesday) 2:45p.m. - 4:30p.m. Internet Connection Failure

The Internet connection of the campus network failed from 2:45p.m. to 4:30p.m. on July 19, 2006.  We had immediately reported the problem to our Internet Service Provider, Hutchison Global Communications Limited (HGC), and urged for resuming the Internet connection as soon as possible.  HGC reported that their network fault was fixed at 4:30p.m.  The network fault had caused the failure of the Internet connection of HARNET (the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network) of the eight tertiary education institutions and other sites in Hong Kong.

July 9, 2006 (Sunday) 3:30a.m. - 7:00a.m. Service interruption of the HKU Portal and database related systems

There will be a scheduled maintenance in the above period to install software patches of the database systems.  All services relying on the Oracle databases of the systems in the Computer Centre, including the following, will be suspended:

• HKU Portal
• All database services and administrative applications including:
  • Student Connect
  • University Information System (UIS)
  • HKUESD
  • All applications under UIS.

May 20, 2006 (Saturday) 4:00p.m. - 7:00p.m. Service interruption of the Student Connect system and TPG on-line application system

There will be a scheduled maintenance in the above period on the S80 system for replacement of some hardware components by IBM engineers. Services for the Student Connect system and the TPG on-line application system will be suspended in this period.

May 17, 2006 (Wednesday) 1:20p.m. - 4:30p.m. Network service interruption of the HKU network at Queen Mary Hospital and Admiralty Centre

The HKU network at Queen Mary Hospital and at Admiralty Centre was paralysed due to many network equipments were busy handling massive number of data packets. The sources of the heavy traffic were traced to be a PC at New Clinical Building, Queen Mary Hospital, and a PC at Admiralty Centre which were infected with a trojan horse. Each PC was continuously sending abnormal data packets at a rate of 100,000 data packets per second while changing the source IP addresses, thus making the trace of its origin very difficult. The source at New Clinical Building was located at 3:45p.m. and the source at Admiralty Centre was located at 4:30p.m. After disconnecting the network cable from the network switch to the room where the source was located, the network service was resumed to its normal condition.

May 8, 2006 (Monday) 2:50p.m. - 5:50p.m. Network service interruption of the HKU network due to a PC on the HKU network at Queen Mary Hospital

The HKU network at Queen Mary Hospital and the Internet access from the HKU Network were affected due to many network equipments on the HKU network at Queen Mary Hospital and the Internet firewall were busy handling massive number of data packets. The source of the heavy traffic were traced to be a PC at New Clinical Building, Queen Mary Hospital. The PC was continuously sending abnormal data packets at a rate of 100,000 data packets per second while changing the source IP addresses, thus making the trace of its origin very difficult. The source at New Clinical Building was located at 4:50p.m. After disconnecting the network cable from the network switch to the room where the source was located, the network service was resumed to its normal condition. All the network service was resumed to its normal condition at 5:50p.m.

April 16, 2006 (Sunday) 2:00a.m. - 6:00a.m. Suspension of WWW/HKUPortal/UIS/Intranet/Extranet Services

There would be a scheduled maintenance for the following systems to apply operating system patches and firmware update to facilitate subsequent SAN storage upgrade works on 16 April 2006:

(1) WWW.HKU.HK
Maintenance period: 2:00a.m. - 3:00a.m.
Services affected: All web sites on www.hku.hk

(2) UIS.HKU.HK, EXTRANET.HKU.HK and HKUPortal
Maintenance period: 2:00a.m. - 6:00a.m.
Services affected: All HKUPortal services, Extranet services as well as UIS and Intranet services

Note: During the maintenance period, you can still access e-mail and WebCT E-learning at http://webmail.hku.hk/ and http://ecourse.hku.hk/ using your HKU Portal UID/PIN.

We are please to report that all the services should have resumed normal at around 6:00a.m., 16 April 2006.

March 20, 2006 (Monday) 12:10 p.m. - 4:55 p.m. Power Outage in the Computer Room

There was a power outage in the Computer Room on Monday (March 20, 2006) ) at 12:10 p.m. causing failure of a number of the backbone network equipment and computer servers.

The affected network equipment and computer servers were manually switched to bypass the faulty UPS and most parts of the campus network connectivity were restored in about 15 minutes. However, one major network switch/router of the campus network backbone had broken down and caused services of ACEnet, Hallnet, hkusua.hku.hk, graduate.hku.hk, webmail.hku.hk, hkuportal.hku.hk including HKUESD and UIS, and extranet.hku.hk to become inaccessible.

After replacing the faulty supervisory Engine of the failed network switch/router by the maintenance engineers, all network services were fully recovered by 4:55 p.m.

December 27, 2005 (Tuesday) 2:00a.m. - 8:00a.m. Upgrade of HKUCC server system

We are pleased to inform you that the HKUCC.HKU.HK server system will be upgraded on December 27, 2005 (Tuesday). To facilitate the upgrade work, all services of the HKUCC.HKU.HK system, including the email service, will be suspended during scheduled maintenance period.

Should you encounter any problem in accessing the HKUCC.HKU.HK system after the scheduled period, please contact our Computer Room at 28592496, or report the problems to ithelp@hku.hk by email.

We are pleased to report that the HKUCC server has been successfully upgraded and all services resumed normal by 7:30a.m. on Tuesday, Dec 27.

December 18, 2005 (Sunday) 7:40a.m. - 11:00a.m. Network service interruption at Sassoon Road campus

There was a power outage in many of the buildings in the Sassoon Road campus starting Sunday 07:40 and affected the operation of the computer network. At 11:00, the Estates Office colleagues connected temporary electricity generator to provide electricity to most of the affected buildings and the computer network resumed normal. (Some buildings with no electricity were still affected.) At 18:20, the Estates Office colleagues disconnected the temporary electricty generator for the buildings and the Hong Kong Electric Co. rerouted their electricity cables to provide electricity to the buildings. At 19:00, network services for all the affected buildings were back to normal.

October 30, 2005 (Sunday) 7:30a.m. - 11:30a.m. Upgrade of GRADUATE email server

In order to improve the speed of the GRADUATE server, a system upgrade will be carried out on the coming Sunday. All services of the GRADUATE server will be suspended and will not be accessible during the above period.

We are pleased to report that the graduate email server, graduate.hku.hk, has been successfully upgraded and all services resumed normal by 11:05am on Sunday, Oct 30.

October 1, 2005 (Saturday) 12:30p.m. - 12:55p.m. HKU Portal service interruption

A system failure of the HKU Portal server occurred at 12:30p.m. on October 1, 2005. The server resumed normal services at about 12:55p.m.

October 1, 2005 (Saturday) Migration of HKUESD system and maintenance of WebCT ECOURSE system

1) Migration of the HKUESD system to two new computer servers will take place from 2 a.m. -10 a.m. The new HKUESD and HKUCA servers are expected to give much better system performance after this upgrade. All HKUESD applications will be suspended during this period including:

Performance Review and Development for staff
Research Outputs System for staff
Leave application for staff
Purchase laser printing units
Amenities facilities booking
Sports facilities booking

2) Maintenance of the the WebCT ECOURSE system will take place from 8 a.m. - 9 a.m. for applying a system patch to rebuild the account database to cope for future growth. Users will not be able to access WebCT directly or via the HKU Portal during the maintenance period. However, other applications in the HKU Portal will continue to be available.

September 28, 2005 (Wednesday) 12:30p.m. to 5:45p.m. EXTRANET.HKU.HK service interruption

Network connectivity to the server "EXTRANET.HKU.HK" was unstable since 12:30 p.m. (September 28, 2005). The server was closed at 2:10 p.m. and emergency repair of this system by engineers was carried out. The following commonly used services on the server were affected:

On-line application to RPG and TPG programmes
Alumni Computer Account System

The server resumed normal services at about 5:45p.m.

September 21, 2005 (Wednesday) 3:00 a.m. System Services Interruption: Status Report

A newer version of users' files, as at about 1:30 a.m. on 14 September 2005, on graduate.hku.hk have been recovered. These are the latest version of files that we can restore, and all the emails recovered are kept as sub-folders under the folder '20050914'.

September 18, 2005 (Sunday) 4:33 a.m. System Services Interruption: Status Report

The system has resumed its services with all the files restored at 4:30 a.m. on September 17, 2005. All emails in the INBOX and mail folders in the Graduate server created before 1:30 a.m. on September 13, 2005 have been restored and placed under the folder '20050913'. All previous mail folders can be found under the folder '20050913' as subfolders.

September 17, 2005 (Saturday) 10:30 a.m. System Services Interruption: Status Report

The latest status of the file restoration in relation to the failure of disk storage system on September 15, 2005 is as follows:

Users on the graduate.hku.hk system have been provided with access to their new incoming emails since 4:00 a.m. on September 16, 2005. The file restoration was completed at 4:30a.m., September 17, 2005. We are in the process of moving the restored files to end users mail folders.

September 16, 2005 (Friday) 7:00 p.m. System Services Interruption: Status Report

The latest status of the file restoration in relation to the failure of disk storage system on September 15, 2005 is as follows:

1. The restoration of web pages for the departments and student societies on the www.hku.hk system has been completed and the system returns to normal operation.

2. Users on the graduate.hku.hk system have been provided with access to their new incoming emails since 4:00 a.m. on September 16, 2005. The file restoration is expected to complete by mid-night, September 17, 2005.

For HKU users, you can access to the unaffected services of HKU Portal and Student Connect.

September 16, 2005 (Friday) 4:30 p.m. System Services Interruption: Status Report

The latest status of the file restoration in relation to the failure of disk storage system on September 15, 2005 is as follows:

1. The file restoration on the hkucc.hku.hk system has been completed and the system returns to normal operation.

2. Recovery of the web pages for the departments and student societies on the www.hku.hk system has been progressing well and should be completed by 7 p.m. today.

3. Users on the graduate.hku.hk system have been provided with access to their new incoming emails since 4:00 a.m. on September 16, 2005. The file restoration is expected to complete by mid-night, September 17, 2005.

For HKU users, you can access to the unaffected services of HKU Portal and Student Connect.

September 15, 2005 (Thursday) 10:30 a.m. System Services Interruption

Due to a serious fault of our disk storage system since 1:00 a.m. (September 15, 2005), many of our system services have been suspended. Emergency repair of this system by engineers has been carried out and the hardware is now recovered, but it is estimated that it would still take several more hours to recover the data on the file systems.

The following server systems are affected:

www.hku.hk (system down, service expected to recover by 6:00 p.m. today)
extranet.hku.hk (system down, service expected to recover by 6:00 p.m. today)
hkusua.hku.hk (system down, service expected to recover by 6:00 p.m. today)
graduate.hku.hk (system down, service expected to recover by 6:00 p.m. today)
The disk fault also affects the storage of the email account of some users of the hkucc.hku.hk system.

For HKU users, you can access to the unaffected services of HKU Portal and Student Connect.

July 28, 2005 (Thursday) 4a.m. to 7a.m. Internet Service Interruption

The Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC) has selected Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) as the new HARNET Service Provider for this year. As informed by HGC, they will carry out the HKU network migration to a new HARNET backbone in the above scheduled period. During this period, our University's Internet connectivity will be interrupted in the following manner:

(1) An overall 15-minute window of total service suspension for:

- all Internet communication with oversea's Internet sites;
- CERNET (China Education and Research Network),
- TANET (Taiwan Academic Network),
- local Internet sites in Hong Kong (connected through HKIX), and
- communication of other member institutions of JUCC (i.e CUHK, HKUST, PolyU, CityU, BU, LU, HKIEd)

(2) Normal service will be maintained for communication with:

- research universities and institutions having Internet2 connectivity

In short, please avoid using the HKU Campus Network for accessing network sites other than the Internet2 sites. Should you encounter any network connection problems after the scheduled period, please report to our Computer Room (Tel: 28592496).

July 1, 2005 (Friday) 5:00a.m. to 12:00 noon Suspension of WEBMAIL, HKUSUA and ECOURSE services and Lab PC login

The storage sub-system of the WEBMAIL, HKUSUA and ECOURSE systems will be upgraded in the above stated period. During this period, the following services will be suspended:

WEBMAIL system - no login to HKUCC, HKUSUA and GRADUATE email servers.
HKUSUA system - suspension of all services including e-mail, personal web, etc.
Laboratory PC login using HKUSUA account - no login and no printing from the PC laborartories or the ACEnet.
ECOURSE system - no WebCT services

June 21, 2005 (Tuesday) Electricity supply failure problem causing networking problem at St. John's College

Failure of electricity supply to network equipment at St. John's College (SJC) has caused networking problem at SJC, until electricity supply became normal.

June 18, 2005 (Saturday) 2:00 p.m.- 3:00 p.m. Maintenance of the GRADUATE server

Maintenance work is scheduled for the graduate.hku.hk email server in the period above for upgrading the firmware of the storage sub-system. During this maintenance period, the e-mail service provided by the the graduate.hku.hk system will not be available.

The extranet.hku.hk server will also undergo maintenance in the same period. Affected services include RPG/TPG Online Applications, DAAO on-line services, non-Jupas admission, and HKU online job vacancy queries.

May 8, 2005 (Sunday) 8:00 a.m.- 9:00 a.m. Maintenance of HKU Portal, HKUSUA & Webmail systems

System maintenance work on the HKU Portal, HKUSUA & Webmail systems will be carried out during the period when all services of these systems will be temporarily suspended.

Details about the maintenance are as follows:

(1) Maintenance of HKUSUA and Webmail

Two CPUs of the computer server for supporting HKUSUA and Webmail services have been found faulty and we need to arrange them to be replaced by engineers of the vendor on Sunday.   During the above period, webmail and all services of HKUSUA, including its e-mail, personal webpage, ftp and telnet services, will be suspended.

(2) Maintenance of HKU Portal

In order to solve a problem encountered by some users in accessing "HKU Portal for staff" from Internet, a software upgrade for HKU Portal will be carried out on coming Sunday during the above period.   All HKU Portal services will be suspended during this period.

May 1, 2005 (Sunday) 8:00 a.m.- 12:00 noon Suspension of the HKUSUA system

There will be a system software upgrade on the HKUSUA server in order to improve the disk storage performance of the HKUSUA system. During this period, all services supported by the HKUSUA server will not be available including the following:
- e-mail access,
- personal web service, and
- telnet and ftp access

Maintenance of Webmail database on May 1, 2005 (Sunday) morning

At the same time, there will also be a software upgrade on the HKUSUA server that holds the database of the personalized settings for all webmail users.

While the webmail service will still be available during this period for the HKUCC and Graduate servers, the functions for changing users' personalized "Addressbook" and "Options" settings would be affected. Please do not use the "Addressbook" or "Options" icons for changing your webmail settings during this period.

The "login" function of webmail may also be affected for short intervals (of about 5-10 minutes) during this period. Should you encounter login error, please retry the "login" step after a few minutes.

March 14, 2005 (Monday) 7:30 a.m.- 9:00 a.m. Suspension of the WebCT system

There will be a system patch upgrade work on the ECOURSE.HKU.HK system that provides WebCT service to fix the tape drive access problem.  During the above maintenance period, the WebCT service including MyWebCT under HKU Portal will not be available.

Post- installation note - After the installation of a new fiber channel driver, it failed and the system was reverted to its previous version. We will re-schedule another time for the the maintenance.

March 12, 2005 (Saturday) 1:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Suspension of Services on the BIOINFO server

There will be a maintenance schedule for the BIOINFO system for setting up the file system for the newly installed disk system. During the above maintenance period, all services provided by the BIOINFO system will not be available.

March 8, 2005 - (Tuesday) 9:00 a.m.- 10:00 a.m. Suspension of Services on the BIOINFO server

There will be a maintenance schedule for the BIOINFO system for setting up the file system for the newly installed disk system. During the above maintenance period, all services provided by the BIOINFO system will not be available.

February 14, 2005 - (Monday) 9:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Suspension of Services on the BIOINFO server

There will maintenance work on the BIOINFO system at the above scheduled time to upgrade the CPU and memory of the system. The new CPU performance is estimated to be 2.5 times the current performance and the new memory will be 4 times the existing memory size. During the above maintenance period, all services provided by the BIOINFO system will be suspended.

February 6, 2005 - (Sunday) 6 a.m. - 6:30 a.m. Suspension of Webmail Service

Due to system maintenance work on the Webmail database, the Webmail service for the HKUCC, HKUSUA or GRADUATE servers would not be available either via the URL http://webmail.hku.hk or via MyEmail in the HKU Portal during the above time period.

February 6, 2005 - (Sunday) 4 a.m. - 5 a.m. Suspension of Internet connectivity

The HARNET Service Provider PCCW will perform network maintenanace work on the HARNET backbone in the above period. During this period, our University's Internet connectivity would be affected in the following manner:

(1) Total service suspension for all Internet communication with overseas commercial Internet sites

(2) Normal service would be maintained for communication with:

- institutions having Internet2 connectivity (most universities in U.S., Europe and Asia)
- CERNET (China Education and Research Network)
- TANET (Taiwan Academic Network)
- local Internet sites in Hong Kong (connected through HK Internet Exchange (HKIX)), and
- other member institutions of JUCC (CUHK, HKUST, PolyU, CityU, BU, LU, HKIEd)

Should you encounter any network connection problems after the scheduled period, please report to our Computer Room (Tel: 28592496).

January 31, 2005 - (Monday) 9:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Suspension of Services on the BIOINFO server

Due to an upgrade of the firmware and disk controllers in the BIOINFO server, all services provided by the
BIOINFO system will not be available during the above period. The hardware upgrade of this system is scheduled for a later date in February.

January 17, 2005 - (Monday) 6:00 a.m.- 6:20 a.m. Suspension of Services on the HKUSUA server

There will be an interruption of services on the HKUSUA server during the above period due to system upgrade re-configuration. During the above period, all services on the HKUSUA server will be suspended.

January 1, 2005 - (Saturday) 7:00a.m. to 7:30a.m. Temporary Suspension of Webmail

The HKU Webmail service will be temporarily suspended for 30 minutes in the morning of Saturday, 1 January 2005 for the migration of the Webmail database to a new server. During this period, the webmail service via webmail.hku.hk or MyEmail in the HKU Portal will not be available for email accounts on the HKUCC, HKUSUA or GRADUATE servers.

December 19, 2004 (Sunday) from 1:00 a.m.to 11:00 p.m. - Suspension of services for the BIOINFO, HPCPOWER and HKUHPCC servers and PC laboratories in the Run Run Shaw Building

Due to modification work on the Electrical Main Switch Board in the Run Run Shaw Building by the Estates Office, electrical supply to the building will be suspended in the above period. While the Computer Centre will try our best to maintain most of our services during the above period, the BIOINFO, HPCPOWER and HKUHPCC servers will be suspended. All our PC laboratories in the Run Run Shaw Building will also be closed during this period.

November 21, 2004 (Sunday) from 1:30a.m. to 12:00 noon - new HKUSUA server installation

The Computer Centre is pleased to announce that the HKUSUA system will be installed on a new and more powerful HP 9000 rp8420 server. All services on the HKUSUA server will be suspended during this period, e.g.:

1) Email sent to hkusua.hku.hk will be queued and put into the new HKUSUA system when it is in operation.
2) Applications including Mathmatica, Matlab, SAS and SPSS
3) Personal web sites
4) Program development tools, e.g. compilers
5) Oracle Database

The new HKUSUA system runs the HP-UX operating system instead of the Sun Solaris operation system. All user compiled programs requires recompilation on the new HKUSUA system. If users should encounter any problem after the migration, please send email to ithelp@hku.hk, or seek assistance from our Help Desk at Room 104, Run Run Shaw Building (or call 2859-2480) during office hours.

November 17, 2004 (Wednesday) from 7a.m. to November 18, 2004 (Thursday) 9:30a.m. - intermittent network access failure for HKUPPP/HKUVPN

Some users after login HKUPPP/HKUVPN had found that they could not visit some web sites on the Internet during this period. It has been traced to be caused by the abnormal behaviour of the HKUPPP/HKUVPN routers. The service has resumed normal after resetting the routing tables of the routers at 9:30a.m. on November 18, 2004 (Thursday).

November 7, 2004 (Sunday) from 8:00a.m. to 9:00 a.m. - HKU Portal Maintenance

Please be informed that the HKU Portal service will be suspended for scheduled maintenace on coming Sunday (7 November 2004) from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

During this period, the Webmail and WebCT ecourse services will continue to be accessible through the following websites directly:

(a) Webmail - http://webmail.hku.hk
(login required:
- use HKUPortal UID/PIN as the email Account Name/Password, and
- select the email server hkucc.hku.hk or hkusua.hku.hk as
needed)

(b) WebCT ecourse - http://ecourse.hku.hk
(login required:
- use HKUPortal UID/PIN as the WebCT ID/Password)

November 2, 2004 (Tuesday) from 2:00a.m. to 10:10a.m. - WebCT system disk failure

The disk subsystem of the WebCT system failed from 2a.m. to 10:10a.m. The WebCT service was not available during the period.

October 31, 2004 (Sunday) from 1:00a.m. to 7:00a.m. - Upgrade of HARNET Network Backbone & Internet Service Interruption

The HARNET Service Provider PCCW will perform a network router upgrade on the HARNET backbone on coming Sunday (31 Oct 2004) from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. early in the morning. During this period, our University's
Internet connectivity would be affected in the following manner:

(1) Total service suspension for:

• all Internet communication with international commercial Internet sites;

(2) Short service interruption for communication with:

• CERNET (China Education and Research Network), and
• TANET (Taiwan Academic Network)

(3) Normal service would be maintained for communication with:

• research universities and institutions having Internet2 connectivity (most universities in U.S., Europe and Asia),
• local Internet sites in Hong Kong (connected through HKIX), and -
• other member institutions of JUCC (Joint Universities Computer Centre)
  (i.e CUHK, HKUST, PolyU, CityU, BU, LU, HKIEd)

October 15, 2004 (Friday) 4:45a.m.- 5:45a.m. - Maintenance of the WAN links between the Main Campus, Queen Mary Hospital & Sassoon Road Campuses

During this period, network communications between these three locations and access to the Campus Network and Internet from Queen Mary Hospital & University premises on Sassoon Road (including the Faculty of Medicine Building, Estates Office Building, Laboratory Animal Unit Building, Dexter Man Building & halls of student residence on Sassoon Road) will be interrupted.

September 26, 2004 (Sunday) 4-5a.m. - HARNET-Internet Connection Upgrade

The HARNET-Internet connection will be upgraded from the current 155Mbps to 240Mbps during the above period. Normal Internet access should not be affected during this period.

August 29, 2004 (Sunday) - Scheduled Maintenance on the HKUCC and WEBCT systems

(1) HKUCC - In order to fix a recently encountered software bug on the HKUCC.hku.hk server, we have to interrupt the service on this server to perform the software upgrade. All services running on the HKUCC server including email and the GCG system will be suspended in the following period:

7:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. (Sunday, 29 August 2004)

(2) WEBCT - We are pleased to announce that the Computer Centre is upgrading the WebCT server (ECOURSE.hku.hk) to a more powerful HP Proliant DL560 server. All WebCT services, including the MyWebCT service in the HKU Portal, will be suspended in the following period:

8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. (Sunday, 29 August 2004)

August 8, 2004 (Sunday) 7:30 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. - Scheduled Maintenance on the ECOURSE, EXTRANET and GRADUATE systems

There will be a scheduled maintenance on the ECOURSE and EXTRANET systems for implementing a software update of the SAN storage system. All corresponding web services including WebCT will be suspended during the above maintenance period.

As well, there will be a software upgrade on the GRADUATE system on this date. The GRADUATE server will not be accessible and all e-mail services will be suspended from 7:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

August 1, 2004 (Sunday) 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. - Scheduled Maintenance on the WWW.HKU.HK System

There will be a scheduled maintenance of the www.hku.hk system on the coming Sunday for implementing a software update of the system. The www.hku.hk system will not be accessible and all web services will be suspended during the maintenance period.

June 5, 2004 (Saturday) 1:45a.m. to 2:30a.m. - Internet failure

The university's internet connection failed at 1:45a.m. in the morning of 5 June 2004 due to a network attack from the Swire Hall at an IP address on the Internet (probably due to the action of a computer virus). The network resumed to normal at 2:30a.m. after some network ports in the Swire Hall were blocked. The network within HKU was not affected during the incident.

May 24, 2004 (Monday) 10:30p.m. - Campus network failure

The university campus network failed on 24 May 2004 at about 10:30 p.m. due to malfunctioning of a router-switch of the backbone network. After a re-configuration of the network backbone equipment by our Network and Systems staff, network connectivity resumed at 00:45 a.m. on 25 May 2004. The functions and services of the following servers were affected by the network failure and were restored in the following sequence:

* www.hku.hk - 1:10 a.m.
* hkucc.hku.hk - 1:30 a.m.
* hkuportal.hku.hk - 2:10 a.m.

May 22, 2004 (Saturday) 12:35p.m. - Air Conditioning Problem in Computer Room RR108

At 12:35, it was found that the chiller units for our Computer Room (Room RR108) failed and caused rapid rise of the temperature inside the Computer Room. The Estates Office was called to repair the chiller units. Due to the high temperature, some computer systems were shut down in order to reduce the heat generation and to avoid damage to the system hardware. When the temperature in the Computer Room fell to normal level, the different computers were restarted. The administrative systems were out of services during the period 13:45 to 14:45. The HKUSUA mail system, WebMail services, the electronic course WebCT system, the server for the PC Laboratories, and the BIOINFO system were out of services from 13:45 to 16:45. The high performance PC cluster systems HPCPower and HKUHPCC were out of services from 13:30 to 16:40.

April 15, 2004 (Thursday) 9:30a.m. - Electricity Power Interruption

At 9:30a.m., an electricity power interruption occurred in the Main Campus area. All network equipment and computers for central IT services in the computer room resumed service at 10:30a.m., except the HKUSUA system and the HKUESD system. The HKUSUA system resumed service at 11:40a.m. The HKUESD system resumed service at 2:40p.m.

March 23, 2004 (Tuesday) 1:45p.m.-2:30p.m. - Slow performance of access to the Internet

The Internet firewall of the campus network suffered from Denial of Service (DoS) attack which flooded the Internet firewall with abnormal network traffic. After the problem was traced and the TCP ports 1025, 2745, 6129 and 5000 were blocked at the Internet firewall, the network traffic resumed normal.

March 18, 2004 (Thursday) midnight-4p.m. - Slow performance of the webmail server

The webmail server suffered from slow performance today.  The problem was due to system error and after the service was taken up by another backup server, the performance of the server was back to normal.

February 25, 2004 (Wednesday) 6:00-6:30a.m. - Emergency maintenance on the HKUSUA System

Service on the HKUSUA system was interrupted briefly in the above period to clear the long mail queue that had accumulated in the system as a result of the system failure on Monday Feb 23, 2004.

February 23, 2004 (Monday) - Hardware failure on the HKUSUA System

The HKUSUA server suffered a hardware failure on the above date and services were suspended during the periods of 9:45-10:20 a.m. and 4:10-5:30 p.m. While the HKUSUA server was down, the HKUSUB backup server took up all the services of the HKUSUA server. After the vendor engineer replaced the faulty system board, the HKUSUA system recovered at 7:50pm.

February 22, 2004 (Sunday) 7:30-10:30a.m. - Scheduled Maintenance for the WWW.HKU.HK System

There will be a scheduled maintenance on the WWW system to apply a system patch which would rectify a software bug encountered recently as recommended by our vendor. During the above maintenance period, there will be no services on the WWW system.

February 17, 2004 (Tuesday) 10:30p.m.-1:15a.m. - BIOINFO System failure

The BIOINFO system crashed due to system error at 10:30p.m. The system was successfully booted up again and all the services resumed at 1:15a.m. next day. We are working with the vendor to apply a definite fix of the problem.

February 17, 2004 (Tuesday) 5:40-9:50p.m. - WAN link problem to Ricci Hall, University Hall, Hing Wai Centre, Tsan Yuk Hospital, and HKU SPACE town centres at Admiralty Centre and Austin Tower

The WAN (wide area network) link service to the above premises suffered from link failure from 5:40p.m. and the link service provider PCCW was informed. PCCW fixed the problem at 9:50p.m by re-routing the link.

January 31, 2004 (Saturday) 7:40p.m. - Electricity Power Interruption

At 7:40p.m., an electricity power interruption occurred in the Pokfulam area. All network equipment and computers for central IT services in the computer room resumed service at 8:30p.m., except the HKUSUA system, the WebCT system and the print server for the PC Laboratories (due to hardware failure). The HKUSUA system resumed service at 11p.m. The vendor hardware engineer was called on Sunday. The WebCT system resumed service at 1:10p.m. on Sunday. The print server resumed service at 4p.m. on Sunday.

January 17, 2004 (Saturday) 7:00-8:30a.m. - HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange) maintenance

HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange) will perform maintenance work during the above period and performance of Internet connection to HKIX sites (mostly Hong Kong Internet sites) may be affected.

January 13, 2004 (Tuesday) 2:00-6:00p.m. - Extranet Service Suspension

There will be a scheduled maintenance of the extranet.hku.hk system for server upgrade to provide faster response to web-based services for our alumni and other users accessing it from the Internet. All services on extranet.hku.hk, such as
- Alumni directory
- Search on HKU Research Projects and Publications
- On-line application for MPhil and PhD admission
will not be available during the above maintenance period.

January 03, 2004 (Saturday) 5:00am - 6:00am (for 15 minutes) - HARNET-Internet connection maintenance

The HARNET Service Provider PCCW will perform maintenance work on the HARNET backbone equipment during the above period. Performance of HKU's connection to the Internet may be affected.

December 31, 2003 (Wednesday) 2:00 p.m.- 5:00 p.m. - Scheduled Maintenance on the HKUCC System

There will be a scheduled maintenance on the HKUCC system to apply a system patch which would rectify a software bug encountered recently as recommended by our vendor. During the above maintenance period, there will be no services on the HKUCC system.

December 25, 2003 (Thursday) 2:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Upgrade of Oracle Databases

The Computer Centre will upgrade five Oracle databases from Oracle 8i to 9i Release 2 and upgrade the computer hardware serving some e-administration applications in the above period. The following services will not be available:

Server	Services affected
HKUAP3/HKUAP4	All host-based, PC-based and web-based applications for administrative systems
HKUESD	HKUESD applications
INTRANET/UIS	HKU Portal, UIS, Intranet Systems for Staff and Students
S80	Student Connect

This major upgrade task will enable the support of Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, in addition to English text, in the Oracle 9i databases.

December 20, 2003 (Saturday) 6:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. - Upgrade of HKU Portal System

We continue the upgrade of HKU Portal server in the above period to a pair of Sun Enterprise v480 systems running in high-availability mode to improve the reliability of the system. During the upgrade, various web-based services, e.g. webmail, WebCT electronic courses and the intranet system will still be accessible directly, but access through the HKU Portal will not be available until the upgrade is completed.

December 15, 2003 (Monday) 9:40 p.m. - Electricity Power Interruption

At 9:40p.m., a wide-area electricity power interruption occurred on the Hong Kong Island. With UPS support in the Computer Centre, the computers and network equipment in the computer room continued to operate. However, some equipment at the Knowles Building, the Library Building Old Wing and the K.K. Leung Building failed to operate. After our operator restarted the equipment at the sites, the services at Knowles Building resumed at 22:05p.m., Library Building Old Wing at 22:30p.m., and K.K. Leung Building at 00:15a.m. on December 16.

December 5, 2003 (Friday) 1 a.m. - 8 a.m. - HKUCC System operating system/hardware error

The HKUCC system suffered from operating system/hardware error over the night and we are working with the vendor for a permanent fix. A long email queue had been built up. The email queue backlog was cleared around 1p.m.

November 28, 2003 (Friday) 7:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. - Upgrade of HKU Portal System

To provide our users with better response and increased reliability of the HKU Portal services, we shall carry out an upgrade of the hardware system and migrate the HKU Portal system to run on a pair of SUN Enterprise v480 systems at the above date and time.

Please also note that the migration includes upgrading the email program under HKU Portal from v3.1 to v3.22. After the upgrade, under MyEmail in HKU Portal, deleted email will be moved to the 'Trash' folder instead of being left in the 'INBOX'. The user need not explicitly click 'Purge Deleted' to clear such deleted email. Mails older than 2 days in the 'Trash' folder will be emptied automatically at login.

November 22, 2003 (Saturday) 7:30 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. - Scheduled maintenance on the HKUSUA system

The HKUSUA system is scheduled for a disk space relocation on the above date and time. During the maintenance period, the following services provided by the HKUSUA system will not be available:

1) Application Software, including Matlab, Mathematica, SPSS, SAS and GIS applications.
2) Web service on web.hku.hk
3) Oracle database on HKUSUA
4) Print quota purchases (print quota purchased during the maintenance period will be updated after the maintenance period)

November 22, 2003 (Saturday) 7:15 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. - WEBCT Service Suspension

There will be a scheduled maintenance on the WEBCT (e-course) system for disk space relocation and software patch installation on the above date and time. All WEBCT courses will not be available during the maintenance period.

November 21, 2003 (Friday) 9:00am to 11:00am - Internet connection problem

The Internet connection to some foreign web sites had experienced problem from 9am to 11am on November 21, 2003. The Internet Service Provider PCCW solved the problem.

October 18, 2003 (Saturday)  2:00pm - 5:00pm -   Firmware upgrade of the BIOINFO system

The BIOINFO system is scheduled for an upgrade of the firmware and its disk controllers at the above date and time. During the maintenance period, all the services provided by the BIOINFO system will be suspended.

The Internet connection has experienced problem in the period 1:45pm to 2:25pm on October 2, 2003. The Internet Service Provider PCCW solved the problem.

The HARNET Service Provider PCCW will perform maintenance work on the HARNET backbone equipment during the above period.  Performance of HKU's connection to Internet may be affected.

The Computer Centre will upgrade the current network router for connections to HKU remote campuses during the above period.  Access to Internet for users located in Prince Philip Dental Hospital, Queen Mary Hospital & Sassoon Road Campus (including Faculty of Medicine Building & residential halls on Sassoon Road) will be affected.

The network links to the campuses of Sassoon Road, Queen Mary Hospital and Prince Philip Dental Hospital experienced intermittent ups and downs from 9:34am to 12:40pm. Users in these areas may have found it difficult in connecting to the Main Campus and Internet in this period. The problem was found to be caused by hardware failure at our remote links provider, PCCW. It was fixed after PCCW repaired the faulty hardware.

During the upgrade period, a new server will be installed. Services on the graduate e-mail server will not be available.

The HKUSUA server of the HKUSUA/HKUSUB cluster suffered from a hardware failure at around  6p.m. on August 25, 2003.  The HKUSUB server took up all the services of the cluster.  After the HKUSUA server was repaired by the vendor on August 26, an extremely long mail queue had built up on the HKUSUA/HKUSUB cluster.  Moreover, there were extraordinarily many virus-infected email (many were infected by the virus Sobig.F) and the HKUSUA system had to work intensively to scan for the viruses. At times, we had to stop the sendmail program for a while so that the system could clear the email queue backlog. The email queue backlog was cleared around 9:30p.m.

The Computer Centre has scheduled to upgrade the existing graduate email server, graduate.hku.hk, by adding a new computer server to form a High Availability Cluster System with two servers to improve the performance and availability of the email services. The email service will not be available in this period.

August 10, 2003 -- Step 2 of HARNET upgrade, upgrade network connections

• HKU   <=>HARNET             : from 65Mbps to 300Mbps
• HARNET<=>Internet outside HK: from 96 Mbps to 155Mbps
• HARNET<=>Internet within  HK: from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps



During the upgrade periods above, performance of HKU's connection to Internet may be affected. Should you encounter any network connection problems during this period, please contact the Computer Room (Tel: 28592496)

The following services will not be available during the specified time frame within the maintenance period:

1)  All services on HKUSUA, including e-mails and applications (from 7:30am to 12:30pm)
2)  All services on www.hku.hk (from 7:30am to 10:30am)
3)  All services on UIS including staff and student intranets (from 7:30am to 10:30am)
4)  WebCT service (from 7:30am to 9:00am)
5)  Login to Windows XP in PC Lab (login to Windows ME is not affected) (from 7:30am to 9:00am)

After the system upgrade, the HKU Portal services will be extended to the Internet so that they can be accessed using any ISP network and not restricted to the HKU network only. During the system upgrade, the following services will not be available:

• HKU Portal
• UIS
• Student Connect
• Intranet Systems
• HKUESD
• www.hku.hk

The campus network of the University was being scanned by infected systems from Knowles Building and Sassoon Road campus from 2:05pm to 3:40pm. This has affected the access to the Internet between 2:05pm and 2:35pm. After filtering out the source of the abnormal network traffic, the campus network resumed normal at 3:40pm.

The Internet Service Provider (ISP) providing Internet connectivity to HARNET members (including HKU) will be changed from Equant to PCCW in this period.  Next step on August 10, 2003.

Purpose of the maintenance: System Hardware Upgrade and OS Patch Upgrade. During the maintenance period, all services on HKUCC will not be available.

There will be a patch installation on the HKUCC server. During the maintenance period, all services on HKUCC will not be available.

The web server software on www.hku.hk will migrate from iPlanet v4.1 to Apache v1.3.27 on 16 June 2003 (Monday) at 1p.m.  A short interruption of the web services for about 1 minute will be expected.

The hkusub server took up all the services of the cluster hkusua/hkusub.

The hkusub server was back to service at 3:30 p.m. and the hkusua server was up at 4:00 p.m.

May 31, 2003 (Saturday) 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. -- HARNET Backbone Router Upgrade

There will be an urgent software upgrade of the HARNET backbone router in early morning on the coming Saturday to fix a linecard reload problem. Users may experience degraded or interrupted Internet connection during the above period. Please contact Computer Centre (24-hr tel: 28592496) for any enquiry.

The purpose of this scheduled maintenance is to upgrade the firmware of the system and disk controllers. During the above maintenance period, all services provided by the BIOINFO system will not be available.

The Computer Centre has scheduled an upgrade of the HKU-HARNET connection from 60Mbps to 70Mbps in the early morning on the coming Sunday. Users may experience degraded or interrupted Internet connection during the maintenance period. Please contact the Computer Centre (24-hr tel:28592496) for any enquiry.

The Equant Co., our Internet Service Provider,  reported that there was a damage of the trans-pacific link to the U.S.  The remedial work lasted till 7:30p.m.

The Computer Centre has scheduled the replacement of the CPU and the upgrade of Oracle databases installed in the HKUESD cluster from Version 8.1.7 to 9.2.0. in the above period. The HKUESD Applications including Annual Leave, ArtsAll Reimbursement, Purchase of Laser Printing, Computer Centre Ordering will be suspended while the upgrade is in progress.

Please note that the WebCT server for electronic courses will be shut down during the above period for maintenance work on increasing the disk storage for electronic courses. During this time, all WebCT services will be suspended.

A service maintenance of the BIOINFO system has been scheduled during the period above for applying a critical system kernel patch.  During the maintenance period, all services provided by the BIOINFO system will be suspended.

There will be a scheduled maintenance on the intranet.hku.hk system during the above-mentioned period.  All services on the Intranet Systems for Staff/Students will not be available during the maintenance period.

At noon on 14 February 2003, disk hardware failure of the HKUHPCC system occurred and the supplier's engineers resolved all hardware problems around 9:30a.m. on 15 February. When the system was restarted, the RAID file system was found to be corrupted and could not be rebuilt. We had to restore the file system and all user files using the backup tape of 1a.m. on 11 February 2003. The files created/updated between 1a.m. on February 11 2003 to noon on February 14 2003 were not recovered.

On 13 February 2003, the campus network connection to the Internet has suffered great performance degradation in the periods 1p.m. to 1:45p.m. and 2p.m. to 2:30p.m. due to DDoS attack, where a lot of connection requests were made through the Internet firewall. After tracing out and blocking the offending sub-networks, the Internet access was back to the normal.

At about 1:20p.m. on 25 January 2003, the campus network of the University encountered a serious DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, now known to be the MS-SQL Server Worm (also called Sapphire, SQL Slammer, SQL Hell) which attacks Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on the Internet. This attack incident had caused failure of our network routers in performing their normal network routing functions until 7:30p.m. when most of the suspicious attack sources were identified and isolated. The sources of the attack came from Internet sites outside the University as well as from a number of network segments in the Haking Wong Building, Knowles Building, KK Leung Building, Run Run Shaw Building and the Hui Oi Chow Building. In order to isolate the problem source and restore normal function of our network, we have disabled the network ports of the suspicous network segments until the infected computers are cleaned of the worm.

In order to configure the SAN storage device to attach to these three servers, the following services will be suspended in the maintenance period:

1)  All WebCT courses and services
2)  Login to Windows 2000 and XP in the PC labs run by the Computer Centre (users can continue to use Windows ME during the maintenance period).

Scheduled maintenance on the HARNET backbone will be performed by Equant (the HARNET-Internet ISP) during the following period in which the performance of our Internet connection may be degraded:

January 11, 2003 (Saturday) 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. -- Scheduled maintenance of the HKU WWW system (Patch installation)

During the maintenance period, there will be no service on the HKU  WWW system.  Affected service includes web access to University-wide web pages hosted on www.hku.hk system.