IT Maintenance Windows

IT Services (Technology Solutions) schedules maintenance windows to perform regular work on its infrastructures (network, servers, workstations and software services). Regular maintenance is important to ensure that software and infrastructure is properly patched, and changes to provide better services can be implemented on a timely basis.

There are three types of scheduled maintenance windows: Workstation Maintenance Windows, Minor ICT maintenance windows and Major ICT maintenance windows, and each are discussed in the following sections.

Workstation Maintenance Windows

Regular workstation maintenance windows, occur Wednesday night between 10pm - 3am (5 hours), though your machine will only reboot in order to apply patches or application updates as required. This ensures that your computer has the best protection from cyber-attacks or other software vulnerabilities, identified by vendors or agencies such as AUSCERT.

Laptops that are off campus at the time of the maintenance window, will still reboot if they have pending updates.

IT Services also offers an “in hours” maintenance window Wednesday 11am - 4pm weekly (5 hours) for systems that require staff onsite to restart processes after a system restart.  Please contact the Central Service Desk, if you have a workstation that needs to be included in the “in hours” maintenance window.

Minor IT Services Maintenance Windows

Minor IT Services Maintenance Windows are regular publicly advertised time slots which allow the implementation of changes that will impact services. There are three (3) minor maintenance windows scheduled each week:

1. Monday morning (4 am to 7 am AEST);
2. Wednesday evening (8 pm to 2 am AEST Thursday); and
3. Sunday (6 am to 10 am AEST).

All scheduled service outages are notified via IT Services Bulletins.

The Minor IT Services maintenance windows are used for regular computing and communications upgrades and maintenance. Where possible, any scheduled upgrades and/or maintenance of IT Services computing and communications infrastructure requiring service shutdown or restart, will be scheduled during these maintenance windows.

The Monday morning maintenance window will be used for planned monthly system maintenance which will affect the availability of some corporate systems, including the Student Management System (including eStudent), Ascender HR System (including My HR Online), and Finance One.  This will usually occur on the third Monday of every month.

Major IT Services Maintenance Windows

Major IT Services Maintenance Windows may occur once every six (6) months. The windows are weekends (from 7pm Friday to 11pm Sunday AEST) when the entire JCU network - and all services - will be unavailable to allow upgrades to be performed.
Note: These will be server and/or network upgrades - not application upgrades. These scheduled outages are notified in advance via IT Services Bulletins.

These major ICT maintenance windows should be taken into account when planning any University event that requires any computing and/or networking services on-campus, including video conferencing.

These weekends are chosen with extensive consultation with the University community to avoid study periods one and two, trimester periods, as well as taking into account constraints such as:

• Study period census dates

• Subject result release dates

• QTAC offer dates

• Enrolment periods

• Graduation ceremonies

• Payroll runs

The overall criterion we adhere to in selecting these dates is to minimize the impact on academic activities.