Server Downtime - Monday 25 July (19:30 UTC) & Thursday 28 July (21:00 UTC)

I have received the following (expected) message from the company who host the Weather-Watch.com/MML server…

I would just like to confirm that your server will be moved to our new data centre on Thursday 28th July 2005 at 10:00pm BST. This move is necessary, and will allow you to benefit from the improved network and infrastructure at our new datacentre.

This move should take no less than 30 minutes, and no longer than 3
hours to complete, also settings such as IP addresses will NOT change.

As a result the Weather-Watch.com forum and redirection service and the MML data feed and Management Centre will all be unavailable from approximately 20:55 UTC on 28th July 2005 for between 30 and 180 minutes.

In addition as the server hasn’t been rebooted for around 100 days, I intend to do a reboot on Monday evening (25th July) at 19:30 UTC to ensure that the server re-starts cleanly. I may be in bed asleep when the server comes back up on 28th July, so I’d like to have a reasonable idea that it will come back on-line correctly when it’s booted up after the move to the new location. The reboot on 25th July should only take 10-15 minutes.

The new location sounds good…there is 32Gbps of network connectivity to the location and the servers will have burstable network bandwidth of 100Mbps rather than the current 10Mbps. I’m not sure how much difference this will make, but on paper it looks much better!

You may have seen that my Dad is in hospital. He seems to be recovering now, so that’s good. However, visiting times meant that I missed the reboot slot I had planned for yesterday evening. So at short notice I rebooted things this evening (at approx 22:15 UTC). The server seems to have rebooted successfully with nothing obvious missing.