Posts Tagged: web
UC ANR Data Center cutover changed to Dec. 9
Based on feedback from various stakeholders regarding our Data Center move cutover activities, ANR leaders have approved adjusting the start time to accommodate critical deadlines. Originally scheduled for Friday, Dec 8, at 5 p.m., the new start time is now set for Saturday, Dec 9, at 6 a.m.
The new cutover schedule is from Saturday, Dec 9, from 6 a.m. to Monday, Dec 11, concluding at 7 p.m.
Various web-based services, such as UC ANR websites, UC ANR Portal, VMS, and the survey tool, will be unavailable during the cutover. However, hosted separately, Outlook email, Zoom, and project board will operate without interruption.
The IT team will provide regular updates on the progress via email throughout the cutover.
Your support and understanding are crucial during this project. If you have any concerns, we encourage you to reach us at ucanrit@ucanr.edu
Regards,
Sree Mada
Chief Information Officer
UC ANR Data Center move begins, expect service disruptions Dec. 8-10
Update 11/30/23: The cutover schedule has been revised and will now be Saturday, Dec. 9, from 6 a.m. to Monday, Dec. 11, concluding at 7 p.m.
ANR IT is excited to provide an update on our progress on relocating to a new Data Center and firing up new equipment. This project represents a significant step forward for ANR's IT infrastructure, bringing us closer to our objectives of modernizing our architecture, ensuring system stability, and ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
Minimizing impact on your work
As the project progresses in the next three weeks, our IT team is dedicated to minimizing disruptions to your work and ensuring clear communication. There will be downtime and potential interruptions to IT services during this transition. We carefully scheduled our activities to coincide with low-activity hours to keep any disruptions to a minimum.
Timeline
Nov. 20 to 23: The Dell Services team will physically rack and connect new servers in the new data center. There is no impact on ANR services.
Nov. 23 to 30:The Dell Services team and ANR IT will start the virtual server migration process, followed by the data migration. Further details will be shared after our analysis is completed.
Final cutover: The tentative cutover to the new data center target is Friday, Dec. 8, through 7 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 10.
The final cutover scheduled for Dec. 8-10 will result in the temporary unavailability of various web-based services, such as UC ANR websites, UC ANR Portal, VMS and the survey tool. However, Outlook email, Zoom and project board, which are hosted separately, will operate without interruption. The IT team will keep you informed of the cutover progress through regular email updates.
Note: The transition will not impact Giving Tuesday on Nov. 28.
Your support and feedback
Your support and understanding are essential during this project. If you have any concerns or feedback, we encourage you to share them with us at ucanrit@ucanr.edu.
Sree Mada
Chief Information Officer
Web server scheduled maintenance May 3 from 7 to 8 a.m.
To ensure we continue to enhance our security posture, we will be moving our infrastructure behind a new Palo Alto Firewall.
During this maintenance window, UC ANR web services will be down and unavailable. This includes ucanr.edu, ArcCatalog, and all subdomains, i.e., website.ucanr.edu.
Planned maintenance activities will occur on Wednesday, May 3, from 7 to 8 a.m. While we anticipate the outage being shorter, we want to allocate an hour for the move.
Thank you in advance for your patience and support. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with IT at anritg@ucanr.edu.
Jim Edgar
Infrastructure Supervisor
UC ANR web services update
Dear Colleagues:
I'd like to provide you with an update you on the status of our system's extreme instability over the last week and the plans and measures being put in place to solve the issue in the immediate and long term. We understand your frustration and the difficulties with the recent outages are causing, and want to reassure you that our team has been working diligently to identify the cause of the outages and to implement solutions to prevent them from occurring in the future.
The IT team has conducted a thorough investigation into the possible causes of the outages, including reviewing system logs and analyzing performance metrics, while consulting with external experts. While these efforts are still ongoing, an inconspicuous technical issue has been preliminarily identified as a probable cause. In balancing the need for cybersecurity and accessibility, a technical conflict seemed to have emerged between our cyber virus-detection application and the servers' operating system. This conflict is causing the system to shut down.
We are putting in place the following measures:
A: Based on recommendations from a Microsoft technician, we have temporarily removed said third-party virus detection application from the servers and are monitoring system stability. With this action, the system is currently stabilized and the website and ANR web portal are now up and working.
B: We are building a new server on the latest operating system. To ensure that the new server and any application that resides there will be compatible, this process will be performed manually without importing settings from the old servers with legacy stability issue.
Additionally, working with the Program Support Unit, the IT team has also prioritized assisting PSU with moving their event registration web pages to the cloud-based Aventri system so that they can remain up and functioning for the many events that are coming up soon, including the very important ANR Statewide Conference, regardless of ANR's own web services performance status.
We understand that system stability is critical to our operations, and we assure you that we are doing everything possible to resolve the issue. Thank you for your patience and continued support as we work through these issues.
Regards,
Tu Tran
Associate Vice President for Business Operations
Find YOUR Soil
Soils vary across a landscape according to soil-forming factors present in a particular location. To help those involved in land management and planning, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched the National Soil Survey in 1899 to systematically map changes in soils across the country. Results were originally organized by county, and the mapping results published in county soil surveys.While the paper surveys were useful, one had to use several maps at different scales to locate the soil-map units for a site-specific location, then cross-reference the mapping unit to tables provided in the survey to obtain information on soil properties. Today, county soil survey information has been converted to a digital format known as the Web Soil Survey (WSS), which is accessible to the public via the Internet. The WSS provides the USDA's official soil survey data and information in a digital format. The tool was developed and is maintained by the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Information in WSS is generated from the National Cooperative Soil Survey conducted by NRCS. The WSS can provide user-defined, site-specific information on soil properties that can be useful for agricultural producers, conservation professionals, scientists and others.
It is important to note that the accuracy of WSS is determined by the scale of the soil map. Most soil surveys are conducted at a scale of 1:20,000; reading soil data and maps should be performed at the same scale to ensure accuracy. A major advantage of WSS over the original paper surveys is that data can be extracted in digital formats, which can be imported directly into a geographic information system (GIS). The information can thenbe spatially aligned with other digital information, such as maps, satellite imagery, photo- graphs, and user-specified geographic coordinates obtained from global positioning systems, or GPS. This allows land-resource managers to efficiently aggregate information tailored to a specific purpose or location. For example, agricultural producers can overlay crop yield maps created with yield monitors with WSS information to determine how different soils may affect crop production
https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm
Web Soil Survey (WSS) provides soil data and information produced by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. It is operated by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and provides access to the largest natural resource information system in the world. NRCS has soil maps and data available online for more than 95 percent of the nation's counties and anticipates having 100 percent in the near future. The site is updated and maintained online as the single authoritative source of soil survey information.
Soil surveys can be used for general farm, local, and wider area planning. Onsite investigation is needed in some cases, such as soil quality assessments and certain conservation and engineering applications. For more detailed information, contact your local USDA Service Center at the following link: USDA Service Center or your NRCS State Soil Scientist at the following link: NRCS State Soil Scientist.
soil heading pictures