This website is no longer maintained. Its content may be obsolete. Please visit http://home.cern/ for current CERN information.
David Jacobs CN/DI
This year CERN closes officially on Friday 20th December at 17:30 and reopens on Monday January 6th at 8:30. All CN's central computer services will be stopped from lunchtime on Friday 20th December for rundown and file backup. On the CORE batch services, long and very long queues will be stopped on the 18th December in the evening, all other queues on the 19th December in the evening. All services will remain off on Saturday 21st December to permit work by ST Division on the general CERN power system.
Some services will be restarted on Saturday night but there are expected to be frequent interruptions on Sunday due to necessary CERN-wide network maintenance. Outside the Centre, there may also be short power cuts on the Sunday due to continuing work by ST on the power throughout the CERN site.
The following CN services should be accessible but unattended (therefore best efforts only) from Monday December 23rd, although there will be a short break in the ACB (telephone dial-in) service on that Monday while CERN's main telephone exchange is updated.
| ACB | normal service except on Monday morning, 23rd December. |
| NICE | normal service but no backups will be taken during the holidays. |
| Mail service | normal service; the period during which mail is held, because the destination is not responding, will be increased from the normal period of 3 days to cover the entire shutdown. |
| AFS | normal service; backups will be taken daily but cannot be guaranteed. |
| PLUS/WGS | All PLUS servers (including the interactive part of CERNSP) and all WGS servers will offer normal service although it should be remembered that they depend on both the network and AFS services operating correctly. |
| VXCERN | normal service. |
These services will then be left running but unattended throughout the rest of the Christmas and New Year holidays; "unattended" here implies that there will be no guaranteed support for any of these services although some central operations staff will be present from time to time to run various checks on the services. Messages for Operations can be left on an answering machine at CERN telephone 75011 (767 5011 from outside CERN).
Concerning the general purpose computer network, no service across the site can be guaranteed due to possible partial power cuts outside the control of CN Division. However as usual external transit traffic (Internet) will be maintained.
During the weekend of January 4th/5th some further maintenance will be done on a few services, for example the AFS service will be down for some 8 hours during the afternoon of January 5th for upgrades and reconfiguration.
The following services will NOT be generally available during the holidays
| ORACLE | no general service. |
| Printing | no central print spool (Springer) service. |
| ADSM | no workstation file backup service. |
| CORE batch | no service, including no tape service. |
| CERNSP batch | no service. |
Normal service on all CN services will be resumed on the morning of January 6th. The restart of some batch services may be slightly delayed but it is aimed to have all CORE services running by the evening of the 6th.
Further information on the above will be published by individual services nearer the time.