There will be suspension of electricity to the Data Center (Computer Room) of the Computing Services Center (CSC), around the Lunar New Year's holiday period next year.

It is a statutory requirement by the HKSAR to have all fixed electrical installations to be inspected and tested in a five-year cycle. To do that, all electrical sockets, panels, power source, etc, inside each room in the whole university campus need to be shutdown and tested. Anything that is found to be malfunctioned needs to be replaced on the spot.

This would mean that all computing equipments inside the CSC Data Center need to be shutdown during that checking period. As a consequence, all centrally provided computing services including the whole campus network, the central servers for critical services such as eLearning, email, Banner, etc, will be out of service during that time.

Tentative blackout period for the above exercise will take place on 17th Feb 2007, from 00:00 to 07:00.

As this will seriously affect the normal services of the whole university, the CSC is working very hard on implementing a very detailed plan to prepare for this and to include all possibilities so as to reduce the impact to users to a minimum. The CSC is also seeking cooperation from all departments not to schedule any important events during that period as much as possible.

More announcements on this subject will be made in due course.