CST Division Help Desk

For critical emergency assistance outside of business hours (8AM to 5PM), please contact Jefferson Lab (JLab) Security Guards at (757) 269-5822.  The guards will then contact our on-call staff.  A few examples of critical emergencies would be major system or network downs or a problem affecting the experimental program.  All personal computing problems should be sent in an email to helpdesk@jlab.org, which will go through our work request system and be addressed as soon as possible.

Hours of Operation

A Computing and Networking Infrastructure (CNI) staff member is available at the Computational Sciences and Technology (CST) Division Help Desk (helpdesk) on the second floor of the CEBAF Center, F-Wing, Room F201A from 8:00AM to 4:30PM, Monday through Friday.  JLab computer users can call the helpdesk at x7155, (757) 269-7155 during those hours for immediate assistance. 

Work Requests and Problem Reporting

Requests for support from the IT Division can be made by emailing helpdesk@jlab.org, or submitting an request in our ServiceNow incident handling system.  Any request made through this system:

  • is immediately entered into our tracking system
  • is assigned to a responsible staff member
  • notifies the sender of the assignment of a tracking number and assigned staff .

Response Times

The CNI group strives to provide timely turnaround on all user requests for assistance. Since a person needing assistance perceives "timeliness" differently than one providing it, we provide our definition of timeliness in the table below as a baseline for user expectations.

PROBLEM GOAL FOR RESPONSE TIME
Major central outages - network, systems, services Immediately, including after-hours
Smaller outages - partial network, systems, services Immediately - 2 hours, including after-hours if it affects the accelerator or experimental program
Group outage 2 hours - same day
Group problem Next day - 2 days
Individual user outage Next day - 2 days
Individual user problem Less than 1 week

Please note that these goals are the longest we hope that it takes to get issues resolved.  In many cases if the problem or outage is already familiar to us, it can be resolved much sooner.  We prioritize based on the severity of the problem, including such factors as - how many people are affected, the impact on the lab, the impact on CUE systems, networking, databases.  We provide after-hours response for problems impacting the running experimental physics program or interaction with Accelerator Controls.

The answer to your problem may already be available on this site.  We provide web pages for common configurations for supported software.  We strive to acknowledge ServiceNow incidents within 24 hours, and often are able to do so much quicker.  For common configurations and general questions, you may find the answer to your problem on this site.

ATTENTION:  Accelerator and Engineering Division Staff & Users

The Accelerator and Enginerring Division has their own support staff for computing.  Please use the ACE Incident form to submit a work request for assistance with computing.

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