ECN supported Linux machine to be rebooted Tuesday 3/1 or Thursday 3/3

[Rich Franks]

Good afternoon-

ECN staff members need to patch and reboot ~560 of our redhat linux
workstations and servers to fix a serious vulnerability in glibc, a
foundational library for virtually all services.  Essentially, this is all
ECN supported RedHat Enterprise version 6 machines.

We plan to take a two-stage approach to try to minimize disruption, and
give us a smaller subset of potential problems to work through. Please
try to not have running jobs during these days, you run the risk of job
interruption.

1. On Tuesday, March 1st, all "standalone" linux machines will be
rebooted.  That is to say, any/all machines which do not share data via
filesystems via NFS and/or Samba/CIFS services. Standalone machine are
typically used by individuals in their lab or office.

2. On Thursday, March 3rd, all of the "homeserver" machines, which do
serve filesystems to other machines via NFS and/or Samba/CIFS, will be
rebooted.

If you are interested in further details of the vulnerability, this is a
good place to start:http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/457759

If you are able to have your machine rebooted sooner, or if the proposed schedule imposes a hardship upon you/your users, please contact ECN via the hardware queue (email hardware at ecn.purdue.edu) and we will do our best to work with you.

Thank you for your patience while we attempt to address this serious matter.

Rich Franks, Systems Engineer
Engineering Computer Network