At 9AM on Tuesday morning, August 17th, our beloved GAIA general access Solaris-based UNIX servers will be powered off and permanently retired as part of a long term TSO goal to migrate services off of older Sun SPARC hardware to newer Intel based Linux systems. The servers to be retired include gaia.cc.gatech.edu, gaia2.cc.gatech.edu, gaia3.cc.gatech.edu and gaia4.cc.gatech.edu. The functionality and role of these servers have been replaced by the more contemporary KILLERBEE general access Intel and Linux-based servers named killerbee1.cc.gatech.edu, killerbee2.cc.gatech.edu, killerbee3.cc.gatech.edu and killerbee4.cc.gatech.edu. The KILLERBEE cluster is comprised of four Dell PowerEdge 1950s, each with two quad-core CPUs and 8GB of memory. For information, refer to our General Access Servers web page.

To avoid unpleasant surprise, TSO will individually notify users via email who have logged into the GAIA servers in the last 90 days. The KILLERBEE cluster also supports the Sun Ray Thin Client appliances that remain in the College, providing low-cost Linux desktops for graduate students. Existing Sun Ray Thin Clients in labs will be replaced with newer models.

After the GAIA retirement, users may notice UNIX software differences that affect their shell environment. For example, there may be some 3rd-party or open-source software installed in the shared GAIA /usr/local directory that is not present on the KILLERBEE systems. Simply submit a help ticket and TSO will install the software if at all possible. Users will also need to make sure their shell start up files (aka dot files) are updated to satisfactorily customize their shell environment.

If you have any questions, comments or notice any problems, please send your request to helpdesk@cc.