Maintenance Schedules
Overview
To ensure high availability and continued quality of service, IT Services has in place a number of fixed maintenance windows.
During the fixed maintenance window, there may be a temporary loss of services across part of, or the entire range of services provided by IT Services. Where such a temporary loss of service is likely to affect critical services, IT Services will attempt where possible to ensure that the disruption does not happen during important periods of the Academic year, including the commencement of each semester, and during the exam period and the weeks leading up to it.
Fixed maintenance activities may include:
- Removing or replacing hardware on servers
- Bringing new servers online
- Applying patches to servers
- Apply security patches issued by the manufacturer
- Implementation of software enhancements
- Installation of software bug fixes
- New or updated software on servers
- Network infrastructure maintenance (switches, routers etc)
- Data Centre UPS maintenance
It should be noted that unavoidable (emergency) downtime can occur as a result of hardware faults, at almost any time. Such events are rare, however when they do occur, IT Services will provide as much notice to users as possible and work to resolve the fault as quickly as possible.
Change Freeze Periods
In consultation with stakeholders of the University’s most critical applications, IT Services has identified periods throughout the year in which no changes will be made to infrastructure unless absolutely necessary.
Notification
If a maintenance window is going to be used, a notice will be sent to all system users via the IT Services Help Desk at least two weeks prior, detailing what services will be affected and for how long the outage will occur. If a maintenance window will not be used due to unforeseen circumstances, then a notice will be sent to all users confirming availability of all or some services. The http://www.its.mq.edu.au/maintenance/index.html web page will be periodically updated to reflect any upcoming maintenance.
Emergency Maintenance
It should be noted, that on rare occasions, there may be a requirement to install a critical “security” patch on ITS Servers to prevent a problem occurring. These Emergency Maintenance requirements may fall outside the scheduled maintenance periods, due to the criticality of these patches. Should this occur, ITS will liaise with the relevant Faculties, detailing what services will be affected and how long the outage will occur. IT Services will endeavour to provide a minimum of two (2) weeks notice to affected users.