News

EAST-1 will be offline on October 4-5 due to energy system maintenance


The Ångström laboratory houses the UPPMAX compute hall, and the property manager, Akademiska Hus, will be performing work on the cooling system during 2023 as part of an energy-saving project called “Project Bläckfisken.” Project Bläckfisken is a modernization project in which Akademiska Hus is constructing an energy system that allows for the transfer of heat and cooling between different building structures, catering to specific needs. As part of this energy system, the UPPMAX compute hall will contribute heat during the winter months. To facilitate this process, Akademiska Hus kindly requests a 48-hour power-down period for the compute hall between October 4 and 5. During this time, all systems, including the Swedish Science Cloud (SSC) East-1 region, will be temporarily unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding as we aim to inform you well in advance.

Upgrading the WEST-1 region of Swedish Science Cloud in September

In Semptember we will begin upgrading the WEST-1 region hosted by Chalmers e-Commons to the latest version of OpenStack and also add some new hardware.

This will improve the capacity and funktionality of the WEST-1 region.

Unfortunately, it also means that the WEST-1 region will be down and unavialable for some time this fall and eveyting that any data currently stored there will be removed.

If you are currently using WEST-1 you must make sure to:

  • Backup your data.
  • Move your workloads and data from WEST-1 to either EAST-1 or NORTH-1.

If you have any questions or if you need assistance, do not hesitate to contact support@cloud.snic.se and we will help you.

EAST-1 power failure (resolved)

At 00:57 CEST on Monday, May 29th a power outage caused the cooling system at Ångström Laboratory to shut down, leading to a rapid increase in temperature within the compute hall. To prevent further temperature escalation and safeguard the equipment, all systems in the compute hall were forcefully powered off. The cooling system was restored at approximately 05:00.

Due to the elevated temperatures experienced during the outage, additional inspections are required to ensure the compute hall, compute, storage, and network hardware are functioning as expected. Currently, we have identified an issue with one of the two UPS units.

Throughout the day, we will provide regular updates regarding the progress of the recovery efforts and the status of the affected equipment. We are working diligently to resolve any issues and restore normal operations as soon as possible.

Update 2023-05-29 11:00

The compute hall is fully operational again. We are now working on restoring systems.

Shutdown of all systems on 2 february at 07:00 CET

The UPPMAX compute hall hosting EAST-1 will be partially shutdown during 2 February between 07:00 – 11:00 CET as Akademiska Hus performs work on the cooling circuit. The shutdown has been planned to coincide with our February maintenance day. We will try to provide some level of access but expect all compute capability to be unavailable until the work is completed.

If you have any questions please contact us at support@uppmax.uu.se.

Best regards, UPPMAX

Serious vulnerability in pwnkit (CVE-2021-4034)

Pwnkit is installed by default in most linux distributions, there is no permanent fix yet but there is a workaround, you can remove the suid bit from the binary using chmod 0755 /usr/bin/pkexec and that will make it impossible to exploit this bug.

  • Pkexec is installed by default on all major Linux distributions.
  • Pkexec has been vulnerable since its creation in May 2009.
  • Any unprivileged local user can exploit this vulnerability to get full root privileges.

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-4034