As you may have read recently two critical vulnerabilities in most modern processors have been announced. They are called Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown only affects Intel processors and there is a patch for our systems that became available shortly after we restarted our systems after last night’s power outage. We will be applying the Meltdown patch tomorrow afternoon, hence an unusual Friday downtime is scheduled. It is unclear when Spectre will be fixed.
An update of coxeter and the mail, web, and public servers will be applied and they will be rebooted starting at approximately 4:15pm tomorrow Friday, January 5. We expect that the servers will be back up around 4:45pm if there are no unforeseen problems.
