Hello everyone!
As part of routine maintenance for my servers, it's time for me to upgrade the operating systems on all of them. This is a pretty major undertaking, and will unfortunately cause some service interruptions as I perform the upgrades on my servers.
Ladies On Two Wheels will be impacted by the upgrades on two of my servers, phazon and ridley. The upgrades on phazon won't have much impact - while it is down, emails sent to Ladies On Two Wheels (for example, to the staff@ email address) will not be delivered until after the upgrades are completed, but everything else - including outgoing emails (such as private message notifications) and the site itself - will still function normally. Server ridley, on the other hand, is central to the site's operation, so to minimize disruption, I will move primary operations from ridley to phazon before beginning the upgrade process on ridley, then move operations back to ridley once I have verified that everything is working correctly after the upgrade. The moves in both directions will take about 15 to 30 minutes, during which time the site will be unavailable with a message to try again later. Otherwise, however, the site will still function normally during the upgrades on ridley.
I anticipate the upgrade process to take approximately 12 hours for each server, though the amount of time it will actually take will likely vary - less time if things go as planned, more time if unexpected difficulties arise. Again, the Ladies On Two Wheels site itself will only experience about 15 to 30 minutes of disruption before and after the upgrade process on ridley, and will function normally otherwise during ridley's 12-hour scheduled downtime period (and the site itself will not be disrupted at all by the upgrades on phazon).
The downtimes for the servers are currently scheduled as follows:
- phazon.fastlizard4.org: Scheduled to begin 21:00 Sunday 26 March 2017 UTC, impact to email to the foums only (date corrected) - completed
- Sunday 5:00 PM Eastern Time
- Sunday 2:00 PM Pacific Time
- ridley.fastlizard4.org: Scheduled to begin 20:00 Sunday 2 April 2017 UTC, brief impact to site availability at start and end of upgrade process - completed
- Sunday 4:00 PM Eastern Time
- Sunday 1:00 PM Pacific Time
If you have any questions about this, please feel free to reply and ask below. Some more information and technical background can be found on my operations blog here.
Thanks in advance for your patience during this process!