Universiteit Leiden

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Network maintenance successfully accomplished

Last weekend, all university buildings were closed and the university systems were unavailable. The reason for this was the major maintenance of the university network. The network’s core needed to be shut down for this, including all supplies and services. A large group of staff from ISSC as well as from the Real Estate directorate and Functionality Management were involved in this project. Additionally, groups of end users were engaged in testing the different systems before and after the maintenance.

The maintenance was carried out in phases and according to a closely guided plan. When restarting the basic services, it is essential that the various systems are started up, tested and approved in the correct order. This meant that the ‘baton’ needed to be correctly passed on to the next in line. Only when the basic underlying services were in full working order, were the the testers able to test their end user systems.  

Project leader Aart Koster, speaking about the process

Aart Koster: “We had an ISSC team of four persons to guide the co-ordination and internal communication and to deal with possible problems that arose. We kept all those involved informed all the time about the mileposts, and we gave an update via Teams if the plans changed. It was a large scale operation, involving more than 140 contact persons and testers, and over 25 ISSC staff and colleagues from Real Estate and Functionality Management. Ten of us were on site in the Snellius building and three more in the KOG. Initially, everything went exactly according to plan. We started at nine in the morning on Saturday and after the migration we were actually an hour ahead of schedule. Later, an issue did arise and this lead disappeared. We worked until nine p.m. on Saturday evening, and continued to work on the solution on Sunday morning. At 2.15 we sent the ISSC teams the go-ahead to restart the basic services. The end users were able to start testing their systems at 4.30. This went well. Ultimately, we rounded off our work and closed down at about seven in the evening. There are still a few issues that need to be addressed, but in general everyone is very satisfied. In the many reactions that we received: not a single negative word.”

Many thanks to all staff involved 

A huge compliment and many thanks to all staff and others involved who worked throughout the weekend to make this mega project successful!

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