Ensembl Events in August 2010

Although it's Summer vacation time, there are still a few Ensembl events scheduled the coming month:

18 Aug: Ensembl module in the EURASNET Workshop on Structural Bioinformatics of RNA & RNP at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
29 Aug: Ensembl module at the ESF European Meeting on Next Generation Sequencing at Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands

For details about these and other upcoming events, please have a look at the complete list of Ensembl training events.

Changes to Ensembl Mailing Lists

In the near future, we will be changing the way that the ensembl-dev and ensembl-announce mailing lists are managed.

The move to new hardware and list management software will increase responsiveness on the lists (ensembl-dev in particular has suffered from slow deliveries for some time), and in time will also allow us to provide a searchable archive of past posts.

The list addresses will change with the move:

• ensembl-dev@ebi.ac.uk becomes dev@ensembl.org
• ensembl-announce@ebi.ac.uk becomes announce@ensembl.org

The new addresses are active now.

All subscribers to the old lists have been moved to the new lists. Posts to the old list addresses will be automatically forwarded for a short time, but please update your email address books and any spam filters to reflect the new address list.

Information about the new lists, including details on how to subscribe and unsubscribe, can be found at http://lists.ensembl.org/.

As before, dev@ensembl.org is an open list which any subscriber can post to. Posting to announce@ensembl.org is restricted to Ensembl people.

All sites up and running

All Ensembl sites are up and running - the outage referred to in the previous post only lasted for about 20 minutes.

Site problems - further details and temporary alternatives

As Anne mentioned, at approximately 03:00 UK time on 2 July, the Sanger Institute Data Centre suffered a power failure. The effects of this have taken taken the main Ensembl web site and other resources off line. We are working to get the services restored.


In the mean time, we have two US mirror sites available:

http://useast.ensembl.org is recently launched and provides genome browsing and search facility.

http://uswest.ensembl.org provides genome browsing, but search relies on the main site in the UK.

Please note that BLAST services require the main site at Hinxton and will not be available until the systems have been restored.

Thank you for your patience and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

More power failures

We are currently experiencing further system problems caused by a generator failure at approximately 3am UK time. Our IT staff are working to restore service, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Our US mirror, uswest.ensembl.org, is still available, although features that depend on Sanger services (user accounts, BLAST) will not be working.