Services News

Connect Portal Help forms: https://ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/help/

Please note – we no longer accept support requests by email. Please use the Connect Portal form for the service you require.

Current RI Services’ Status

CSF3 – Tuesday 14th July 2026 @10:00 – Scheduled Maintenance Window.

During this maintenance window, we will apply system updates to the login nodes. To perform these updates, all existing sessions on the login nodes will be terminated at 10:00, and the login nodes will be rebooted. As a result, there will be a short interruption (approximately 30 minutes) during which connections to CSF3 will be unavailable.

This maintenance is not expected to have any impact on the following:

– Running or queued jobs
– Data stored in home directories
– Research Data Storage (RDS)
– CSF3 scratch filesystem

CSF3 – Friday 3rd July 2026 onwards – multicore partition extremely busy

Due to current very high demand, jobs submitted to multicore may take longer than usual to start.

If your jobs do not need large numbers of cores or long running, try multicore_small for a potentially quicker start.

Please do not raised support requests unless your job(s) have been waiting for more than 3 days

CSF4 scratch performance issues

We are currently investigating reports of intermittent issues with listing the contents of directories and deleting files in ~/scratch. This item will be updated when there is further information.

If you find ‘ls’ or other file commands will not work, please do not leave them running.

Please do not raise a Connect request for slow job start unless your jobs have been waiting for more than 3 days.

Other important IT News Announcements

Other login issues to Research Infrastructure Services?

Please first check above for any system-specific or University-wide issues that may have occurred.

Can’t Login – “Account Locked” Message?

An “Account Locked” message is NOT a problem with the CSF. It is caused by your central IT user account being locked due to too many login attempts to other systems with an incorrect password.

A common cause is when users change their UoM IT password. If you didn’t log out of an email app on your phone before changing your UoM IT password, it could still be using your old password. You’ll need to sign out of the app and sign in again. If the app has made too many incorrect login attempts, your IT account may be locked, which will then prevent your CSF login from working.

If you saved your password in an app such as MobaXterm, VSCode or WinSCP, then it may still be trying to login with your old password. You’ll need to remove the password from these apps (we recommend that you don’t save passwords in apps.)

You will need to contact the IT Help Desk to have your IT account unlocked – Research IT CANNOT do this for you.

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CSF Updates

Permanent notice: Scratch files over THREE months old being deleted

Scratch is not intended for long-term storage of files. Files not accessed for THREE months or more are deleted. All users should regularly tidy up their scratch files to avoid data loss. Full details about the policy.

If you have any questions about this policy, please contact us via the HPC Help form

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