Upgrade of Workstations and Migration to the new Storage

This page contains some important information you should know about:

• The upgrade of all the SISSA Linux scientific workstations

and

• The migration of the users' files to the new SISSA storage.

Starting from December 2018 we will upgrade all the scientific Linux workstations in SISSA to the last CentOS version.
At the same time of the upgrade, we will migrate users' files to the new SISSA Storage which is bigger and faster than the previous one.

We will migrate one Sector-PhD at a time, by previously alerting the users by email.
The installation of the new CentOS will be done during the night, so the day after you will find your workstation upgraded and your files moved to the new storage.

See below for important notice about these operations.

Starting from December 2018 we will upgrade all the scientific Linux workstations in SISSA to the last CentOS version.

Please note that all your files both

• in the /scratch area

and

• in your home directory

will be PRESERVED and not touched during the installation.

About your programs:

It is possible that after the installation your compiled programs will have problem to run, due to the upgrade of all the libraries (glibc, gcc, etc.):

During the upgrade to the last CentOS version, your home directory will be moved to the new storage. The new storage is faster and bigger than the prevous one: each user will have 50GB of disk quota.

1) Important home directory changes: After moving to the new storage, your home directory will have a different path/folder/location:
your home directory path will be no more /u/SECTOR/USERNAME but

/u/FIRST_LETTER/USERNAME

for example:

OLD path:         will become           NEW path:

/u/ma/gsmith          ->                /u/g/gsmith
/u/sbp/mrossi         ->                /u/m/mrossi 
/u/he/vbianchi        ->                /u/v/vbianchi

and so on.

2) All your files, but some exception, will be transferred to the new home directory path.

The exception concerns some configuration files/directories, which usually beginning with a dot. For example:

.FILE   or  .DIRECTORY
as 
.esd_auth   or .Mathematica  etc. 

ONLY some of these files (the ones that will not generate problems with the new installed libraries) will be transferred in your new home directory. You find a list of these files/directories here.

You will find all other configuration files/directories in a new directory under your home, called old_home. For example:

/u/v/vbianchi/old_home/.esd_auth
/u/v/vbianchi/old_home/.Mathematica/...

These old configuration files can give problems if used in the new installation.

So, please, PAY ATTENTION if you move back these files/directories from old_home to your actual home directory!

3) Another Important change is the name of your workstation: we will move from the actual “sector-PhD” division to an “area” division, so we will have that:

OLD workstation name   will become   NEW workstation name

host1.ma.sissa.it      ->            host1.maths.sissa.it
host2.fm.sissa.it      ->            host2.maths.sissa.it
host3.lm.sissa.it      ->            host3.maths.sissa.it

host4.he.sissa.it      ->            host4.phys.sissa.it
host5.ap.sissa.it      ->            host5.phys.sissa.it
host6.cm.sissa.it      ->            host6.phys.sissa.it
host7.sbp.sissa.it     ->            host7.phys.sissa.it

4) Samba connection to the new storage:

Also the SAMBA connection will change. You will have:

OLD Samba connection             became       NEW samba connection
smb://filesrv-SECTOR/USERNAME     ==>         smb://nas-users.sissa.it/USERNAME

5) Dropbox

About Dropbox you will have NO CHANGES, and DO NOT need to reinstall it: the files are local to your /scratch directory in your PC, and as stated before, the /scratch will not be removed/changed during the new installation.

As stated before, we will migrate one Sector-PhD at a time, by previously alerting the users by email.
The upgrade will be done during the night and the day after you will find your workstation upgraded and files moved to the new storage with the changes exposed in this page.