Tonight, beginning at 5:00pm cst, we will be replacing components for our primary internet connection. This means no data communication with the outside world; no email, no web browsing, all public facing services including the ALA website, etc. Internal file shares will be available.
We expect a maximum two-hour outage.
Tonight we have the opportunity to move forward on a step necessary for the deployment of our homepage in Drupal. We will be moving the ALA Website to new infrastructure tonight at 5:00pm. We estimate the outage to be no more than 30 minutes.
We will post a text message on the ALA homepage announcing the maintenance.
Thank you.
Sherri
We plan to move the following services to the new Internet circuit this week
Tuesday 2/7
Wednesday 2/8
Thursday 2/9
We have signed contracts with a different Internet Service Provider. The new Internet circuit is up and operational and in use for some of our systems. This new circuit gives us more bandwidth and reduces our telecom costs.
We plan to move the rest of our systems to the new circuit, which requires us to change public IP addresses. This work will begin next week and will last for a few weeks to the extent possible. Public facing services will be migrated after hours beginning promptly at 5pm every evening. We estimate the outages to vary from one to two hours per service.
We will post the schedule of service interruptions shortly.
Well, you’ve surely heard the eggs and omelets expression. The Drupal sites on ala.org are temporarily down as a result of a fix that had to be pushed to the live sites today. We expect them to be back up soon. Please try again later, and accept my apologies for the inconvenience.
Louise Gruenberg | Sr. Usability Officer
We have found what was causing the problem. We corrected it and mail is catching up.
Some of our Dreamhost websites are down. Dreamhost is experiencing an outage on one of their servers.
One of our hosting companies (Dreamhost) migrated one of our accounts to a new server cluster, operating system, and a new 64 bit processor architecture. The migration introduced issues that are taking some time to resolve. As a result, some of our Dreamhost hosted wikis and blogs are being negatively impacted. We expect to have the issues resolved by Monday.
1. New Content Management System Selection Process (Louise)
The Web Editorial Board (WEB) has determined that our new content management system should allow for interactive options, such as widgets, sharing, posting, and so on. This will require a database-driven CMS that delivers dynamic content. We also want to offer flexible design options in a way that reinforces ALA branding and supports usability and accessibility. The timeline for the vendor decision has been set for June 1, with work to begin on September 1. WEB is creating sub-groups to assist with the discussions that will be required to prepare for the new site design and migration.
Staff members interested in serving should discuss it with their unit manager and have him or her notify the conveners of WEB (Karen Muller, Jenny Levine, Louise Gruenberg). We may also need a fourth group to look into digital asset management and archiving issues; there is a 2010 project request under consideration.
With five months between now and the earliest work can begin, units are encouraged to review and weed their collections, archiving material that is no longer current but that should be kept for reference.
We also briefly discussed the advantages of a rolling migration/conversion versus an all-at-once, seemingly overnight changeover.
2. Standard Maintenance Window for Servers (Sherri)
We need a standard maintenance window for our 50 servers. We plan to do maintenance on them every Wednesday from 5:00pm until 9:00pm. This means that we will have interruptions of service during this time depending on the applications running on the servers. We will post notifications. It won’t be every server every week. We plan to begin server maintenance on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010.
3. ALA Connect Pilot Project (Sherri for Jenny)
We have found another software package that contains features (like an expanded search, expanded profiles to collect more interests, advocacy tools, better file repository, and historical CVs) we don’t currently have in ALA Connect. We have decided to do a pilot project with NFi Studios to see if their package meets our needs. Jenny is planning to give a more detailed communication on this topic on the ITTS news blog.
4. Status of New Desktops, Laptops, Netbooks (Sherri)
We replace 1/3 of our equipment every year. We ordered new desktops to replace PCs that were leased three years ago. We are waiting to hear from unit managers regarding the number of laptops and netbooks to order. If a netbook is ordered, you must have a desktop to run applications that will not run on the netbook.
Why Lease? First, leasing forces us to change our technology infrastructure every three years. Second, laptops typically begin to fail in the third year, especially when they are used a lot. Third, the ongoing fattening of application software usually requires more powerful hardware over time.
5. Early May launch of the New Online Learning section of the ALA Website (Louise)
We showed everyone the staging version of Online Learning, the new section of the website that will debut on or about May 3, 2010.
6. The next ITTS News meeting will be on Tuesday, May 25 . See you then.
On Monday we will be upgrading the firmware in all the network switches in both buildings. This will cause
brief outages to the ALA hosted websites but not any externally hosted sites such as ALA Connect or the new
ALA store. We will begin with a core outage affecting all services followed by rolling outages by floor
through the day. The schedule is as follows:
6:00am-7:00am All services will be intermittently inaccessible
8:00am Printers and workstations located on the 5th and 6th floors of the 40 E. building
9:00am Printers and workstations located on the 3rd and 4th floors of the 40 E. building
10:00am Printers and workstations located on the 1st and 2nd floors of the 40 E. building
11:00am Printers and workstations located on the basement and 1st floors of the 50 E. building
1:00pm Printers and workstations located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the 50 E. building
2:00pm Printers and workstations located on the 4th and 5th floors of the 50 E. building
After 7:00am, no global outages or website outages are expected. All work should be complete by 3:00pm.