Maintenance Schedule: Linux servers

[NexDog]

Over the next few weeks we are undertaking a series of necessary upgrades across many servers. These maintenance tasks inlude:

1) Plesk 7.5.2 Upgrades.

Many servers have already been upgraded to 7.5.2 but we still have to do this upgrade on a few servers. Downtime for this Plesk upgrade averages at around 30 minutes but please allow up to one hour in extreme cases. If you have a managed dedicated server, please contact support to organise an upgrade window for your server.

2) Fedora Core 2 Operating System Upgrade.

We have a few servers still running on old RedHat 9 operating systems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this OS but we have found that servers running RH9 are not backing up to our remote backup server correctly. This is due to certain dependancies on OpenSSL and as RedHat 9 comes with an older version, this is making it very difficult for us to maintain coherent regular backups. As having a stable remote backup system is fundamental to our service, this needs to be rectified. Upgrading an operating system on a live server is no easy task and will mean a 2 hour downtime event for the proceedure. This needs to be done on 5 servers (Eta, Kappa, Omikron, Sigma and Atom). On Eta and Kappa, we will be doing the OS upgrade and the Plesk upgrade in teh one 2 hour window.

3) Server Replacements.

We are slowly changing out some of our older servers and replacing them with P4 3.2Ghz machines with 120gb SATA drives with RAID 1. So far we have replaced Beta and Epsilon and next to be done are Gamma and Theta. Downtime should be negligible - 5 or 10 minutes. On the recent Beta replacement we did have an issue with the IPs not routing to the new server but I believe we learned enough from that incident to ensure it won't happen again.

All of the following maintenance windows will start at approximately 4am US EST:

Monday April 18th: Delta, Zeta, Theta - Plesk Upgrade
Tuesday April 19th: Lamda, Omikron - Plesk Upgrade
Wednesday April 20th: Sigma, Omega, NexusWebs - Plesk Upgrade

Saturday April 23rd: Eta OS Upgrade and Plesk Upgrade
Sunday April 24th: Kappa OS Upgrade and Plesk Upgrade

Saturday April 30th: Omikron OS Upgrade
Sunday May 1st April: Sigma OS Upgrade

Saturday May 7th: Atom OS upgrade
Sunday May 8th: Gamma Server Replacement

Saturday May 14th: Theta Server Replacement

Many thanks for your understanding.