PIN System Maintenance Release
From Monday, January 9th through Friday, January 13th, the Identity and Access Management Team in ATS will deploy some maintenance updates to PIN System components. Because of the redundant technical architecture, none of these changes should result in a service interruption of authentication.
In addition to software maintenance upgrades, functional enhancements include:
- eCommons credentials now an option with PIN 3
- terms of use disclaimer being introduced on the PIN Login screen (PIN 3 login screen initially)
As a reminder, in the event you believe that your systems are being affected by a production PIN system issue, your first step should be to contact the HUIT Helpdesk at 6-2001 or helpdesk@harvard.edu. This enables a trouble ticket to be entered immediately with the appropriate team.
Because of the redundant architecture, scheduled updates should not result in any service interruption of authentication.
Schedule:
Monday: Patch proxy servers, one at time.
Tuesday: Update one of the PIN back-end servers. Deploy PIN Login (PIN 3) on one server.
Wednesday: Update the other PIN back-end server. Deploy PIN Login (PIN 3) to the other server.
Thursday: Update both of the the padlproxy servers, one at a time, including update to PIN 2.
Friday: Update Authorization Proxy application servers, one at a time
Future Release:
Release of components to the Disaster Recovery Site will occur in early February after Spring start-up.
If you have any questions, please contact directory_services@harvard.edu.
Harvard Connections Scheduled Outage – Oct 6
Harvard Connections (the internal Harvard directory / connections.harvard.edu) will be unavailable between the hours of 8:00pm and 10:00pm on Thursday, October 6, 2011 while maintenance work is performed on the application.
The public Harvard directory at www.directory.harvard.edu will be available during this time.
Summer Release Confirmed for August 3rd
Production release is confirmed for Wednesday August 3rd. The release will be timed so that the regular exports that run at 11 a.m. daily will be from the new code base. Exports that are part of the 1 a.m. schedule will run for the first time on Thursday, August 4th.
XML Exports Customers note: We are NOT planning to generate zero-day files in order to allow the export to “catch-up” on sending deletes for expired roles. Missing delete records is one of the defects we are addressing with this release. Please direct your questions to the team at directory_services@harvard.edu. We are eager to answer any questions or concerns you may have.
Database Maintenance Sunday July 24 – Outage
Start: 7 a.m. July 24 - Sunday
End: 11 a.m. July 24 - Sunday
Server maintenance (firmware patch) requires database downtime and restart of IDDB and ITS10 databases, including the standby instance.
Maintenance will begin after morning imports and ldap load finish. At conclusion of maintenance, export schedule will resume at approximately 11 a.m. All database synchs and IDM provisioning to the University Active Directory will be suspended. Authentication will NOT be affected.
Services interrupted: PIN self-service, XID self service, ID Card Disable, Image Download, MIDAS, UMailer, Dionysus, Hermes, IDGEN, IDGEN web service, Common Data Web Service, connectivity to the standby database (image data, et al). All imports and exports.
Change/Release contact: directory_services@harvard.edu
Update on Summer Release – Exports
On Wednesday July 13, we released XML export code to Stage again to address some issues we found while testing in our QA environment. We are coordinating some testing with PeopleSoft during the week of July 18 specific to a bug we are fixing that had impact on their export.
The testing has underscored the fact that our current production incremental exports are under-reporting changes in role status; in short, we are not always sending a delete record when a person’s role no longer meets the given feed’s population criteria. This final round of testing will confirm that we have fixed that hole. It also will confirm how we should approach the production release. We are NOT planning to generate zero-day files in order to allow the export to “catch-up” on sending deletes for expired roles.
We will send a final confirmation of the end of testing, and a production go-live date by July 25th. We have tentatively rescheduled the production release for Wednesday, August 3rd.
Please direct your questions to the team at directory_services@harvard.edu. We are more than willing to answer any questions or concerns you may have.
Data Center Outage
Due to the planned 60 Oxford Street data center outage the online directory and MIDAS will be unavailable after 6 p.m Friday June 10. Normal services are planned to resume on Saturday morning June 11.
Summer Release – Export Bug Fixes
For XML Export Customers:
On May 18 the team completed a release of a new version of the XML export code to Stage. Two bugs are addressed.
- 5870: Delete records were being omitted from the incremental exports in some cases where a person was no longer part of the eligible population for the export. [No impact on full exports]
- 5781: PS incremental export; the export will now include data updates that were being omitted in the instance of future-effective dated employees.
The nature of the deployment process necessitated a refresh of the tables that track the incremental changes for exports, so zero day files were executed in Stage. The product team is now testing and coordinating with some teams on specific test cases. As you consume export files in Stage, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at directory_services@harvard.edu. Note that there is not much new data being generated in Stage via import, so the normal volume of data in stage exports is quite low until tests are executed.
The tentative scheduled date for production release was June 15, 2011; however the testing is requiring additional time. Coordination with customers for sign-off and impact of data center outage planning and other operational activity are being taken into consideration as we reschedule the production date. Target is mid July.
June Data Center Outage Info for PIN Customers
TO: Contacts for PIN-Registered Systems
As many of our customers already know, the 60 Oxford Street Data Center is preparing for a temporary power shutdown the second weekend in June 2011 in order to complete critical electrical work. The purpose of this email is to inform you of the approximate timetable of the outages for specific identity and access management services.
The only services that will remain available during the data center outage are:
- PIN Authentication
- for applications that use PIN 2.x and PIN 3.0, that do not involve the Authorization Proxy
- Authentication LDAP service (ldap.pin1.harvard.edu)
- HU-LDAP Service (hu-ldap.harvard.edu)
Timing: Starting at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 10,
- XID authentication will be unavailable for all customers (except those who have moved to PIN 3.0).
- Authorization Proxy authentication services will be unavailable.
So will PIN self-service (e.g. reset your PIN or obtain a new PIN) and XID Self-service and XID Manager tools. All other production applications, services and databases will be unavailable. Also all test applications, services and databases will be unavailable starting Wednesday June 8th through Wednesday June 15th.
We currently expect these production services to be restored by 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 11.
If you have questions, please reply at directory_services@harvard.edu.
Directory Services Product Team
June Data Center Outage Information
TO: Import Data Providers, Export and Image View Customers
As many of our customers already know, the 60 Oxford Street Data Center is preparing for a temporary power shutdown the second weekend in June 2011 in order to complete critical required electrical work. The purpose of this email is to inform you of the approximate timetable of the outages for specific identity and access management services.
On Friday June 10th the import schedule will run at the normal time (1 a.m.) and import new data from Thursday’s business day. The export schedule will be finished by noon on Friday. The common data web services and remote DB listeners will be taken offline starting 2 p.m. Data synchs and provisioning will be suspended at 6 p.m. The standby database will be taken offline around 6 p.m. as will the IDGEN services.
Our current plan is for the imports to resume early Sunday morning, followed by exports. The standby database, web services, provisioning and data synchs will be resumed sometime after noon on Sunday.
Finally, please note that the STAGE IdM environments used for testing will be unavailable starting Wednesday June 8 through Wednesday June 15th. If services return before that time, we will update everyone.
IDM Stage Release 2/23/11
The 2011 Spring Release is going to Stage (test) on Wednesday February 23, 2011. There are three products included this release: MIDAS, Exports and the IDM Application Administration application.
MIDAS release notes will be published to MIDAS users later this week after the release to Stage is completed. Customers are advised that no special training or preparation is required to work with the new version of MIDAS.
Export customers will see zero-day files produced in Stage after the new code base is released. The Product Team will examine the results to confirm that files were produced as expected.
Additionally, the product team will coordinate directly with the subset of customers who requested a change to their export as a result of subscribing to the new POI role type ‘Tenant.”
Note that the production release is scheduled for Wednesday, March 16th. MIDAS will be released outside of business hours. Exports will be coordinated with customers during the day.
As always, questions can be addressed to directory_services@harvard.edu.