ibiblio services/changes announcement list

[John Reuning <john AT ibiblio.org>]

Paul mentioned in his end-of-year note that ibiblio will be migrating
from an off-campus data center to a location on the UNC campus.  The
move reduces our expenses, but more importantly gives us (you
included) room to grow for the next few years.  We plan to use basic
virtualization in the near term and shift to a cloud infrastructure
over time.

Some disruption is inevitable.  However, we will minimize the downtime
for your projects and for www.ibiblio.org by migrating services one at
a time over the next few weeks.  We're taking a careful but rapid
approach because almost all of our current infrastructure is old.  I
hope you will focus on the benefits of new hardware, updated versions
of software, and improved reliability of the new environment.

In the coming weeks, you'll see lots of notes from me about test
environments and migration schedules.  I desperately need your help
testing your applications and coordinating the changes.  Our success
depends largely on your effort and feedback.  We will respond as
rapidly as possible to fix bugs in the system.

To kick things off, I'm targeting next Tuesday (Jan 11) to migrate the
software mirrors and linux distributions.  We have test environments
set up at

http://distro-test.ibiblio.org/
http://mirrors-test.ibiblio.org/

It's still raw.  I only got it working this afternoon.  We should have
a test login server ready by tomorrow or Thursday for those of you who
upload files directly.  I'll send more details in separate messages
later.

Many thanks,

-John R.