Renkulab maintenance and running sessions

Hi all

The latest maintenance window overlaps with our lecture time. Reading the announcement it says “as a consequence the service will not be available during the maintenance, running user sessions will not be affected but wont be able to reach GitLab”. Does that mean that renkulab is not reachable at all but the session will stay alive, or that the session can be reached that gitlab won’t be reachable (e.g. for pushes or new project creations)?

thanks

@a_user I am pretty sure we can delay the maintenance to not interfere with your lecture. Can you tell me the time (and time zone) when you lecture is happening?

As for the effects of the maintenance… During the maintenance gitlab will be unavailable. This means that the following will NOT work:

  • starting new sessions
  • creating new projects
  • pushing and/or pulling to/from gitlab repos from existing sessions
  • building new images for sessions

Yes, if your session is already running prior to the maintenance it will not be shutdown and you will be able to access it. But when you access your session during the maintenance all of the things that have to do with gitlab will not work.

Hi tolevski

Thanks for the information and possible offer. The lecture/exercise is tomorrow Tuesday 8:15-9:30. depending on how reliable sessions can be started just before 8:30 we should be good. Though it would probably be nice to have a slightly longer window for starting sessions (say until 8:45). Of course only if that fits with your planned work, I don’t want you to spring last minute surprises on the other users on such a short notice. We’ll announce to our students to start sessions ahead of time and that will be it.

Thanks again.

hi @a_user

could you please announce your course officially to us? You can use this form.
As you might understand, if a course/exam/workshop given in renkulab.io is not communicated to us it is hard to guarantee that no maintenance will happen during that time and that there are enough resources available, so please use that form from now on.

For tomorrow, we can make an exception and start at 9:30 (we have already postponed this maintenance and this would be the only other time we can do it).
You’d need to make sure that students have their temporary work either pushed to GitLab or saved locally before the start of the maintenance window. I will update the maintenance announcement accordingly.

Hi pameladelgado

Thank you for the offer. We have told our students to start their session before 8:30 and to keep local saves just in case. I think if you keep an eye out for pending sessions we should be good.

Tbh I’m not sure who has communicated with whom on each side, but the course itself was cleared with someone at renku/sdsc :man_shrugging: I’m just doing the technical parts and support :wink: Tomorrow is the last lecture in our course, so there’s that.

cheers

Aha, I see. We have recently put in place the form and its mechanisms so that all the team can be properly informed, it was getting hard to keep track of communicated events otherwise.
Please still fill the now official form (even retroactively, because it helps us keeping track of our teaching outreach as well).

Will do, thanks :+1:

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