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Hi,

Since no major issues have been raised regarding the conversion of nightshade to Solaris, this has been schedule for the maintenance window on January 3rd, 2011. For more information, see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-announce/2010-September/000351.html

During the maintenance window, we will back up crontabs to $HOME/crontab.nightshade, and then reinstall the OS. This will take about 30 minutes. After the reinstall, the system will be identical to willow.

Users who currently use willow for cron will not have to make any changes. Cronjobs using SGE will automatically be scheduled on nightshade as appropriate.

SGE jobs which force "-l arch=lx24-amd64" will fail to run, since there will be no Linux hosts left. If you currently do this, you should remove the arch limit.

Users who have crontabs on nightshade should review the old crontab file (which will be saved as $HOME/crontab.nightshade), then run this command to install it:

$ crontab $HOME/crontab.nightshade

Note there are some differences between Linux and Solaris cron; in particular, "/" syntax is not supported. See https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Solaris#cron for details.

Any issues which prevent your tools running on Solaris must be fixed before the conversion date. If you need system changes for this, file a request in JIRA and include [solaris] in the summary. We will not delay the conversion unless serious unanticipated issues are discovered.

- river.