2025-05-16: UPDATED Engineering Network Outage Information

Hello All,

As you may already have seen in ITS communications and Luc’s prior announcements, several College of Engineering buildings are part of the Secure UCSB network switch replacement project. This is a brief update to reinforce key dates and highlight some significant changes to the schedule that may affect your departments.

Schedule Changes

• Phelps Hall (Building 560)
  As you may have noticed, the planned outage for Phelps Hall was postponed. ITS has not yet announced a new date, and it no longer appears on their outage calendar.

• Engineering 2 (Building 503)
  Similarly, the scheduled outage for Engineering 2 has been removed from the calendar and does not currently appear to be rescheduled.

Harold Frank Hall (Engineering 1) – Outage Extended to 5 Days

New Dates: Monday, May 19 through Friday, May 23
Time: 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM daily
Impact: Full building network outage expected throughout the week (wired and wireless)

Harold Frank Hall houses much of the College’s core infrastructure, including, among others:

• COE Home Directories – affects user files and ~username web content (tilde sites)

• COE Directory Services – used by both Windows and Linux computer lab environments

• Linux-Based Labs – including CSIL, CSTL, Honea Lab

• Windows Labs – including the Auhll Center, Honea Lab, Cooper Lab and Engineering 2 Room 3236

• Instructional GPU Cluster and Virtual Labs

• Various College-Hosted Web Applications

These services should be considered inaccessible for the full five-day period, including for remote users connecting via VPN and other campus buildings. This outage will impact a broad range of instructional labs and College-hosted services. That includes both Linux and Windows ECI managed computer lab environments, web applications, the instructional GPU cluster, and any services that depend on infrastructure located in Harold Frank Hall.

Additional hosted services may be affected depending on routing or dependency on Harold Frank Hall infrastructure.

Although ITS is replacing switches one at a time, and some individual outages may be brief, the overall upgrade process remains unpredictable. As such, full-week disruption planning is still the safest approach.

If you have instructors, researchers, or staff depending on any of these systems, we strongly recommend encouraging early coordination and contingency planning.

I’ll continue to share updates as they become available. Please feel free to reach out if any concerns arise.

Best,