msgbartop
msgbarbottom

20 Nov 13 Major Service Interruption Tonight

 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.

 

20 Sep 11 ITTS News Meeting – September 20, 2011

1. CMS Update (Louise)

Things are moving along
Everything will go into the review stage during the next few weeks
Showed the new versions of PLA, I Love Libraries, LLAMA, AASL, RUSA, ASCLA, LITA, YALSA (some of which still need some work) but are displaying at some level in the new system

Hope that all divisions will have first round of pages on the review site by the end of this week
Then we’ll start on the round tables, offices, and sections
Reviewers should begin hearing from Louise soon
Will take PLA live when Shibboleth is ready, hopefully next week

When your site is ready to go live, you do one last lookover with ITTS on Monday
Tuesday the site is frozen and the migration starts
Go live on Wednesday (can rollback to old site if things don’t go well)
Thursday you come to training (Friday if you can’t make Thursday)

Member volunteers will all eventually get trained, starting with iLinc webinars
Screenshot-based documentation and training will probably become available in December

We’ll be taking sites live on a rolling basis as they’re ready

Shibboleth is moving forward, with just one remaining hangup to get it working on the dev sites

2. Connect update (Jenny)

Showed the new “Suggestions” feature that will be coming soon

Connect Roadmap for FY12:

  1. Implement redesign (hopefully in October)
  2. Add Suggestions feature (hopefully in October)
  3. Midwinter Scheduler (November)
  4. Mobile version of the Scheduler (November)
  5. Migrate to Drupal 7 (work done in January, migrate in February)
  6. Merge Connect profiles into iMIS (February)
  7. Move to Single Sign-On with ala.org using Shibboleth (February)
  8. Migrate to in-house servers (March)
  9. Implement ala.org’s Solr search engine for federated and faceted searching (March)

3. Service outage on Tuesday, September 22, 2011, 5:30-8:30 pm CDT – corrected date (Sherri)

Hopefully the following services will only be down for a few hours early Wednesday evening

  • iMIS
  • Log in to the ALA website
  • Log in to Connect
  • Membership renewals
  • Registration for events
  • Fundraising
  • KMS
  • Track-It
  • Drupal dev site for the new CMS
  • New finance system (check requests, etc.)
  • FRX

Staff: if you’re already logged in to the network, you’ll be able to keep working after 5:30 pm CDT; otherwise you won’t be able to log in during the outage

We’ll put up a message on the public sites when this happens so that users will see a meaningful message

27 Apr 10 Server Maintenance April 28, 2010

As announced at the recent ITTS Update, tomorrow, April 28, will be our first Wednesday evening maintenance.  We will begin promptly at 5:00 pm.  This week’s primary area will be patching our internal file servers.  This effort will position us to move forward on server operating system upgrades.

Please log off (or restart) at 5:00 pm.  Any files open on our network servers will not be saved.  After we begin, you may log in to your workstation (Workstation Only).  Given the way patches usually install (download, install, restart), it might appear that a service is available during phases one and two.  Please don’t connect to the network.  After 5:00, we will be restarting the servers as needed, and you would lose your work.

External resources (internet access, email without archives) will be available, but network resources will not be available.  We do not plan on interrupting our public facing services this week.

We plan on restoring network services at the announced time, 9:00 pm.

Tim

13 Feb 09 Maintenance Scheduled on Network Switches for Monday, February 16th

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.

31 Oct 06 Network Upgrade Updates – October 2006

All known issues stemming from the network switch upgrade conducted in September have been resolved. We have added a network intrusion detection device, which has helped us identify and block suspicious traffic. Barring any further problems, we do not expect to make any further updates to this blog post (until the next upgrade!).

28 Sep 06 Network Upgrade Updates – September 2006

New switching equipment was installed on September 9th. These new “intelligent” switches will speed up network communications and enhance intruder detection. Some communications problems were discovered after the upgrade, but have now been successfully corrected.

05 Sep 06 Network Upgrade Updates – May 2006

May 2006

Cabling is in the process of being installed. We have two proposals for switching equipment and will make a decision the first week of June.

05 Sep 06 Network Upgrade Updates – June/July 2006

June/July 2006

A decision was made to go with HP switching equipment, which has been ordered. Fiber cabling to support the higher speed switches has been installed. The new switches will be installed over a weekend, which will be announced in advance.

05 Sep 06 Network Upgrade Updates – August 2006

August 2006

The installation of new switching equipment has been scheduled for Saturday, September 9, 2006. Internet connectivity will be interrupted for at least one hour, starting approximately 8:00 a.m. CDT. The rest of the building will be down for most of the rest of the day. The interruption will cause the website to be unavailable for about an hour that morning. Email will be deferred and delivered after the upgrade is complete.

07 Jul 06 Network Upgrade – Background

The growth of electronic systems and storage at ALA is taxing our network infrastructure. To increase capacity, we will replace our current fiber optic cabling within the building. After the new fiber cabling is installed, our current electronic switching equipment will be replaced with higher speed gear. This upgrade is scheduled for later this spring.