Submitted by Piete Brooks on Wed, 21/07/2021 - 17:50
The TSS 'ely', the main machine in the slogin-serv.cl.cam.ac.uk ssh service, is being upgraded as there is a security vulnerability in its kernel. If things don't work, please try slogin-new in place of ely.
The main Lab Time Sharing System 'ely' is running a rather old Distribution, which no longer has full security support.
A vulnerability has been found in the kernel it uses, which could be fixed by moving to the HWE kernel, but would just patch up this particular problem, rather than bring it under full support.
ely has a large number of "special features", so doing a fresh install would likely loose some, and the hardware is due to be replaced soon anyway, so we are going to do an in-place OS upgrade. This means that if something goes wrong, we can't just "boot the old OS" as we normally can. The upgrade "should" just work, but it may fail catastrophically, or some feature may stop working.
If you have any problems, please try slogin-new. Send sys-admin a report as to whether things work correctly there.
During the upgrade, things will be changing under the system's feet, so there may be irratic behaviour.
When the upgrade is finished, we'll reboot to use the new kernel, so all connections will be lost.
Users may care to connect to one of the slogin-new now to avoid problems.
