Greetings @us-hosted users!
This is a notice that we will need to temporarily restrict access to https://hosted.eaasi.cloud over this coming weekend for maintenance.
Hosted nodes will be taken down temporarily this coming Saturday, December 18th, approximately 15:00 Central European Time (UTC +2) - 09:00 U.S. Eastern Time (UTC -4) - 23:00 Australian Eastern Time (UTC +10) to update the service with a number of bug fixes and improvements for system performance. We only expect the outage to last a few hours at most, and will alert users in this same thread as soon as the scheduled updates are complete and access to the hosted service is restored.
This outage is intended to address a number of concerns that have been reported in the Support Center, including:
- missing and/or improper Network Status on imported Software resources
- inconsistent caching performance, which led to certain actions (e.g. deleting Environments and other Private resources) often not immediately displaying in the web client, leading to redundant actions and race conditions
- Running Tasks notifications displaying actions from across individual nodes
I will follow up individually in Support Center threads to make sure reports as many reports as possible are resolved. We realize that we are quite close to the winter recess for many U.S. universities and it may take some time to review all reports, but we appreciate your patience and I look forward to working through everyone’s concerns in January if need be!
The vast majority of changes in this update should be invisible to hosted service users, and are intended to improve system stability and performance, with two exceptions:
- some minor changes to text and labels in the interface to clarify actions, and/or remove non-functional metadata input fields
- following the update, there will remain a known issue where only the first file in a multi-file Content resource can be accessed in a corresponding, saved Content Environment; multi-file Content resources can still be accessed properly in a running emulation session via the Emulation Project menu and I will provide details and instructions for a recommended work-around while a fix for this particular problem is investigated
As a last note, I will also use this notice just to to make clear that scheduled maintenance is not related to the vulnerability in certain versions of the Java library log4j that is currently requiring mitigation steps for many commercial and open-source platforms. One of Emulation-as-a-Service’s internal dependencies uses the log4j library, but the version used currently is slightly older than the release with the reported injection vulnerability. The location and use of the dependency is also such that log4j is not exposed to any outside queries of the type this potential attack relies on.
Thank you!