Planned minor service interruption

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Nerzhul
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by Nerzhul »

On short notice, tonight at around 11:30pm CEST a new feature will be rolled out which requires some minor changes to the database. EBT will be unavailable for a couple of minutes.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

Our ISP will upgrade some routers and firewalls on Thursday-Friday night. EBT and the forum may be briefly unavailable within this timeframe:
  • Thursday 22:00 - Friday 00:00 WEST
  • Thursday 23:00 - Friday 01:00 CEST
  • Friday 00:00 - Friday 02:00 EEST
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by Nerzhul »

We're planning a short maintenance break on 2011-04-03 10pm CEST. EBT will be unavailable for around 15 minutes.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

All *.eurobilltracker.eu addresses are now redirected to the equivalent *.eurobilltracker.com addresses. This change was discussed and approved in an earlier EBT Board of Directors meeting. My proposal regarding this was:
avij wrote:Currently both http://www.eurobilltracker.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and http://www.eurobilltracker.eu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; point to the same website, and users can browse the site regardless of which address they've chosen to use. However, this has some nasty technical consequences. In particular, if you've logged in to eurobilltracker.eu, eurobilltracker.com doesn't know you've logged in. With the new stuff like API and mobile version of the site coming up, this is going to be a headache for the tech & development teams. Any subdomain configurations created will also need to be duplicated to .com and .eu. My proposal (which I've discussed with Nerzhul) is to deprecate the use of the .eu domain name and redirect all eurobilltracker.eu requests to the equivalent eurobilltracker.com web address.

Rationale for choosing .com instead of .eu:
  • eurobilltracker.com was the original address
  • The forum lives exclusively under eurobilltracker.com, primarily for the same technical reasons (forum.eurobilltracker.eu is already a redirect)
  • Most traffic still comes to .com (about 78%/22% split, excluding the forum address)
  • Philippe requested to use .com when the Gennevilliers agreement was made
We'd of course still keep the eurobilltracker.eu domain name, but it wouldn't be in active use anywhere.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by Nerzhul »

We're planning a maintenance downtime on Thursday, 11th August at 10:30pm CEST. Both EBT and the forum will be unavailable for ~1.5h.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

1)
We're upgrading the operating system of the main EBT webserver early Thursday morning. EBT and EBTForum will be unavailable between 04:00-04:20 CEST (approximately).

2)
Our ISP is planning to upgrade its network infrastructure. EBT and EBTForum may be briefly unavailable on Friday between 00:00-06:00 CEST for up to 15 minutes (or so they promise).
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

avij wrote:Our ISP is planning to upgrade its network infrastructure. EBT and EBTForum may be briefly unavailable on Friday between 00:00-06:00 CEST for up to 15 minutes (or so they promise).
The same thing will happen again this week at the same time. This week they're "testing the changes they did last week to make sure everything works if there are problems with the network".
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT & EBTF were unavailable for a few minutes this morning while I was installing a new version of lighttpd, a web server software. Apparently the old version wasn't fully compatible with Google Chrome when used with HTTPS. This new version should work better in that regard. Please let me know if something suddenly stopped working.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT and the forum will be unavailable for about an hour early Monday morning due to maintenance work. The break is scheduled to start at about 03:00 UTC, 04:00 CET, 05:00 EET. Most of you should be asleep at that time anyway.

During that maintenance window the following items will be taken care of:
  • Update to the newest kernel
  • Update the server's BIOS and other firmware
  • Some changes to network setup
  • Some changes to firewall setup
  • Verify that all services still start up properly after the changes
  • Verify that SELinux policies work properly
This will be the first reboot of the server since it was installed in August. I have remote console access to the server in case something goes wrong with the network/firewall setup.

edit: The maintenance break took 66 minutes -- I had to reboot the server a few more times than I had expected, and installing the new firmwares also took longer than I had expected.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT's ISP will be doing network maintenance on 13.1. (info only in Finnish). The maintenance window is one hour, starting at 00:00 UTC (UK, Ireland, Portugal), 01:00 CET (most of Europe), 02:00 EET (Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Baltics). There will be short disruptions to EBT's reachability during that time. It is suggested that you enter your notes either before or after the maintenance window to save yourself a bit of grief. There is no guarantee that EBT will be reachable when you have finished filling the note entry form and hit the submit button, if you try entering notes within the maintenance window. The forum is also equally affected.

The last time I wrote to this topic I screwed up a bit with the timezones. BaliBennie was kind enough to point out the error to me, and I fixed the timezone error quickly. I triple-checked the times for this posting, because we no longer have him around to assist us :(

edit: Looks like the maintenance break is now over. EBT remained mostly online during the maintenance break.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

Here we go again..

EBT's ISP will be doing network maintenance on 4.2. (info only in Finnish). The maintenance window is two hours, starting at 00:00 UTC (UK, Ireland, Portugal), 01:00 CET (most of Europe), 02:00 EET (Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Baltics). There will be short disruptions to EBT's reachability during that time. It is suggested that you enter your notes either before or after the maintenance window to save yourself a bit of grief. There is no guarantee that EBT will be reachable when you have finished filling the note entry form and hit the submit button, if you try entering notes within the maintenance window. The forum is also equally affected.

Based on observations from the previous maintenance break, it seems to me that they are preparing for rolling out IPv6 support for all their customers. EBT has been their IPv6 guinea pig since September 2012 or so.

edit: This maintenance break was not particularly visible to EBT users. There was a short <5min break at around 02:00 CET.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT and the forum will be unavailable for about half an hour early Monday morning due to maintenance work. The break is scheduled to start at about 03:00 UTC, 04:00 CET, 05:00 EET. Most of you should be asleep at that time anyway. During the maintenance window the operating system will be upgraded to CentOS 7.1.1503.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT and the forum will be unavailable for about half an hour early Wednesday morning due to maintenance work. The break is scheduled to start at about 02:00 UTC, 03:00 WEST, 04:00 CEST, 05:00 EEST.

During the maintenance window the operating system's kernel will be updated to the latest one, and the server's firmware will also be updated. These updates may require rebooting the server a few times.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

EBT and the forum will be unavailable for about half an hour early Thursday morning due to maintenance work. The break is scheduled to start at about 02:00 UTC, 03:00 WEST, 04:00 CEST, 05:00 EEST.

During the maintenance window the operating system's kernel will be updated to the latest one, and the server's firmware (RAID and network adapters) will also be updated. These updates may require rebooting the server a few times.
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Re: Planned minor service interruption

Post by avij »

The forum will be unavailable for about an hour early Thursday morning. The break is scheduled to start at about 02:00 UTC, 03:00 WEST, 04:00 CEST, 05:00 EEST.

The forum software will be updated to phpBB v3.1.6. This is a largish jump from the v3.0.x branch we have been using.

Unfortunately some language packs that we have been using are not compatible with the new version and will be removed. The languages affected are Czech, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak and Slovenian. This will affect approximately 100 registered forum users.

The language packs for those languages would need to be updated for v3.1.x. If you can translate to those languages, please see the phpBB language pack page and offer your help there. We can reinstall those language packs later on if updated language packs become available.

The main EBT website is not affected, so you can continue entering notes while the forum upgrade is taking place.
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