Public and member UI sites scheduled downtime today

We will need to take some of our internal servers down briefly today: a couple of times for about 10 minutes each between 6pm and 10pm Arizona time (1am and 5am UTC).

We are completing the buildout of our new “ultra-redundant power” rack today and will be moving our master database server, our internal web server, and a couple of other critical infrastructure machines that don’t already have redundant power sources.

This outage will not affect member services, only our own sites (www, blog, and members), FTP, and ssh will be affected during these brief downtimes.

We apologize for the short notice and hope this is not too disruptive to anyone’s site maintenance plans.

2 Comments

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1. Interesting, can you elaborate on how the new setup is ‘ultra-redundant power’ compared to the old? For those poor curious souls like myself :p

   We’re using an automatic transfer switch to allow shifting power dynamically between two building feeds (which are each “supposed to be” uninterruptible / fully backed up) for equipment that happens not to have redundant power supplies. -jdw

   Comment by Ben — April 21, 2008 #

2. Can I pick a nit? You defined the outage according to “Arizona time” and “UTC.” In the future can you please replace “Arizona time” with one of the canonical USA time zones? (PDT, MDT, CDT, EDT) I have never been able to memorize the algorithm that Arizona uses to move between time zones, and not one person in a 10,000 outside of Arizona can either. (Likewise, UTC difference varies by season, and so is also difficult for me.) Thanks,
   A California customer

   Neither Arizona time nor UTC vary by season. Arizona time (at least the parts where we have servers) is always UTC-7. It’s your local timezone that changes based on Daylight Saving Time, and you’re in the best position to be aware of your local changes (there are dozens of variations in the US alone). We use Arizona time because it is the time zone where the affected servers are and UTC is the world standard time zone.

   It’s also worth noting that the “standard” abbreviations you’re referring to mean entirely different things in other countries; their use would be confusing and imprecise. -jdw

   Comment by ohn — April 30, 2008 #

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