nyftp.netbsd.org down for datacenter overhaul; daily builds offline

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%NetBSD.ORG@localhost>]

NetBSD users and developers,

NetBSD's New York build cluster and associated services will be offline
beginning Monday, September 18, 2017, for a period of about two weeks.

This means that, through early October 2017, our daily builds of NetBSD
and pkgsrc will not be available.

NetBSD's cluster runs in space generously made available by numerous
faculty members, researchers, and with assistance from the staff of the
Computer Science Department and Computing Research Facilities of
Columbia University.  As a point of interest, its current location is
approximately 10 feet away from the former location of the experimental
multiprocessor which was my own introduction to "real computing" in the
1980s -- in the same machine room, in a new rack, but on the very same
raised floor.  It is roughly halfway between the former locations of the
VAX on which we read our email, and the VAX reserved for those who insisted
on editing their code with Emacs.

Nearly 40 years later, and after the entire engineering building has been
reconstructed around it, the datacenter in question is receiving a very
heavy overhaul.  Considerable effort has been expended to ensure our
systems were not impacted by most of this work, which has been ongoing
since the spring; but now we will (of course) temporarily shut down the
NetBSD cluster to accommodate the power and cooling adjustments that must be
made by our very generous hosts.

We apologize for the short notice, which is due to the uncertainties so
often encountered with work at the end of long and complex construction
projects.

NetBSD's release engineering team will work to minimize the impact on
the 8.0 release cycle, but some inconvenience and delay should be
expected.  We will all do our best to keep you informed.

Thor Simon
On behalf of the System Administration team of the NetBSD Foundation, Inc.