ibiblio services/changes announcement list

[John Reuning <john AT metalab.unc.edu>]

What: Significant ibiblio services downtime
When: Tuesday, October 22, 8 am - 8 pm EDT

On Tuesday, October 22, 2002, we will be moving the entire ibiblio server
infrastructure into new racks.  This move provides us the space we need to
accommodate growth and continue to offer new services.  Specifically, we
have received grant funding from IBM in the form of 12 new machines, which
we will use to run web services in a clustered environment.  Over the past
year, our traffic has risen from a bit over 3 million to around 5 million
transfers per day.  The increased traffic is a good thing, and we want to
keep growing.  We just need to expand our infrastructure to keep up.

This move requires that we take all ibiblio services offline on a rolling
basis and will probably last all day.  We plan to minimize downtime and,
whenever possible, only shut down and move one machine at a time.  
However, critical elements such as networking and shared file services
will force groups of services to be taken offline in some cases.

We apologize for the inconvenience this will undoubtedly cause.  We've
been communicating with various groups at UNC and just finalized the date
this afternoon.  In the next 3 weeks, we will send reminders and as
detailed a schedule for downtime as we can.  We tentatively expect to
start at 8 AM EDT and be finished by 8 PM.  If you have any questions,
please let me know.

Thank you,

-John Reuning
ibiblio.org