News

Date: Friday, June 13, 2008
Time: 0601 UTC Friday (11:01 PM PDT Thursday / 2:01 AM EDT Friday)
Duration: 4 hours (Estimated)

Maintenance Summary:

Periodically our datacenter providers must perform maintenance on the network systems in order to keep them operating optimally. This maintenance window has been planned for several months; however an issue with a line card on the dar1.orm-ut router has forced the maintenance window to be moved up.

During this 4 hour maintenance window, network engineers plan to perform the following tasks:

1. Replace line card 2 on dar1.orm-ut
2. Upgrade line card 1 on dar1.orm-ut
3. Upgrade firmware on dar1.orm-ut
4. Upgrade firmware on dar2.orm-ut
5. Decommission br1.orm-ut
6. Decommission cr1.slc-ut
7. Install additional line card on dar1.slc-ut
8. Install additional line card on dar2.slc-ut
9. Upgrade firmware on dar1.slc-ut
10. Upgrade firmware on dar2.slc-ut

Service Impact:

• Intermittent public network connectivity, internal or private VLAN connections will be unaffected.
• Multiple 1-180 second outages for customers on redundant connections.
• Multiple 5-10 minute outages for customers on single connections.
• Multiple interface resets.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact us with any questions or concerns.

The aforementioned server migration is now in progress. I’m doing this in batches of 10 or 15 sites at a time. I’ll post again here when I feel like the process is complete (excepting, of course, a few fellows who asked for their migrations to be delayed).

FellowSites will be migrating to a new server beginning at 12:00am PDT / 3:00am EDT / 0700 UTC on Wednesday, April 23, 2008.

We’re performing this migration because our current server is running an outdated operating system and was initially configured with drive partitioning that has proved unwieldy. The new server is running on the latest version of Redhat Enterprise Linux and the partitioning has been improved.

Additionally, we’ve upgraded the following services on the new server:

We’ve got DNS refresh intervals throttled down to mere minutes, so the few sites we’ve already migrated were being served from the new location nearly immediately after they were moved. However, not all worldwide DNS servers honor such requested refresh rates, so your mileage may vary. To be on the safe side, plan on a period of 48 hours for DNS to propagate worldwide.

If you have any sort of dynamic content on your site such as a blog or wiki, you may wish to lock your database during the migration, if possible. If you have any concerns about your site(s) being migrated, please contact us to discuss special arrangements, including, if necessary, rescheduling the migration of your account.

FYI, our IP address will be changing from 208.53.37.202 to 208.53.37.200 and the fully qualified domain name for the server will go from fsserver1.fellowsites.org to fsserver2.fellowsites.org. If you’re using either the IP address or the FQDN for any reason, be aware that you’ll have to begin using the new IP/FQDN after the migration.

Note: if you signed up for an account within the last couple of weeks, you are already on the new server, so this message doesn’t apply to you.