Dartmouth has a Dell PowerScale cluster which provides network file services to the campus. Periodic upgrades are necessary for the cluster and these often require rebooting the front-end nodes that provide connections for client computers. These reboots are staggered so that the service never goes down, but any clients connected to a node that is in the process of rebooting obviously need to reconnect to a different node.
NFS clients running Linux do this automatically and seamlessly.
Unfortunately, the SMB protocol does not allow for the same kind of seamless transition to a different node. The actual SMB client behavior depends on the operating system (Mac, Windows, or Linux) and the application using the storage.
In general, Windows systems and applications will recognize that the connection was interrupted and automatically reconnect to a different node after just a few seconds.
Mac and Linux SMB clients will keep trying the same node for longer. After a timeout period, they declare a network error. Some applications will try to restart the connection from scratch and that will work. Other applications will not, and user intervention is required to restore the connection. Most commonly, Mac users can simply reconnect from their saved list of favorite servers.
Please note that if you were actively using any of these file servers during the entire maintenance window you would experience at least one such disconnection and probably several as we cycle through the nodes to reboot them all.
Below is the complete list of SMB servers which will be affected. You may be connecting to these servers either as server.dartmouth.edu or server.kiewit.dartmouth.edu (or just plain server but that is never recommended because it relies on your computer's DNS search path settings to work).
- cairo-dfac
- castries
- central-finctr
- dartfs
- dartfs-hpc
- ddss
- diamondp
- hood
- inverness
- isi-tier4-smb
- isi-tuck-edc
- ja-ex-doc
- lima
- madrid
- of-advance
- of-a-s
- of-cpf
- of-dcad
- of-dean-college
- of-finance-admin
- of-gsm
- of-president
- of-provost
- of-rics
- oir
- tdidacfs
- thayerfs