[plug] DOWNTIME: PLUG servers offline Friday 12pm-3pm

[Bernard Blackham]

Greetings,

For the past month or three, PLUG's servers have been living in the
houses of Matt Kemner and Cameron Patrick. This was only ever meant
to be a temporary measure, and I'd like to thank both Cameron and
Matt for their hospitality, bandwidth, time and space! Prior to that
LinuxIT have been hosting the machines at their office for as long
as I can recall - I'd also like to extend my thanks to LinuxIT too!

Arachnet have graciously offered to host our machines and we intend
to move spark and shameless there on Friday. Spark is currently
hosting most of the PLUG mailing lists, and acting as a nameserver.
Shameless is the web server, news server and also currently hosts the
off-topic list. Both of these machines will go offline around midday
on Friday and trundle down the road to Arachnet's new data centre.

As xbox is a little more delicate in its boot process, Matt has
offered to leave it at his place where it can be better looked
after.  The xbox currently hosts members' web pages.  As it will no
longer be in the same physical location as members' home
directories, it will be replaced in this task by kettle, a UML
running on shameless.

Additionally, after the move, xbox itself will no longer share the
same home directories as spark, kettle and shameless.  Instead
homedirs on xbox will share the 4GB drive within it. The xbox will
still authenticate with the same usernames and passwords as kettle
and spark.  Note that it might be a while after the move before xbox
becomes available again to PLUG members.

Ideally, the machines will be live again before 3pm on Friday
afternoon and services should be restored.  After the physical
relocation has been carried out successfully, we will begin to move
the remaining services from spark to shameless and open kettle as a
general access machine for PLUG members' use.

If anybody has any questions or problems before or after the move,
feel free to email bernard at blackham.com.au, or if its more urgent
I'm on 0402 291 684.

Regards,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham <bernard at blackham dot com dot au>