Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 10:46:01 -0400 (EDT) From: BCPL.NET SysAdmin To: BCPL.NET News Subject: BCPL.NET NEWS: Scheduled Service Interruption ---------------------------------------------- SCHEDULED SERVICE INTERRUPTION SUNDAY APRIL 27 FOR SWITCH-OVER TO NEW MAIL & WEB SERVER ---------------------------------------------- On Sunday April 27 at 1:30 AM I will take our main UNIX server (mail.bcpl.net) off line in order to replace it with new hardware. The work will take several hours, which is intentionally vague because it is impossible to estimate exactly how long the switch-over will take. I will make every effort to have the new mail.bcpl.net on line and working by 6:00 AM, but no guarantees. The wee small hours of Sunday morning are our slowest period, so the impact on our customers will be minimal even if the switch-over takes longer than expected. During the down time you will be able to connect to BCPL.NET for Web browsing, but that's all. E-Mail, UNIX shell account logins, the BCPL.NET Web site, and BCPL.NET customer Web sites will not be available until after the switch-over to the new mail.bcpl.net is complete. The majority of our customers will not notice anything different after the switch-over, aside from better e-mail performance. Hopefully MUCH better! PPP connections, e-mail, and web browsing will work as they did before, requiring no changes in your software. However those of you who use your UNIX shell accounts may notice a few differences. I have made every effort to ensure that all UNIX programs available on the old server will also be available on the new one, but I may have missed something. Also there may be a few glitches, because it isn't possible to test some things until the new server is actually in use. If you can't find a UNIX program you are used to using, or if you run into one that doesn't work as expected, please report it to the Help Desk at 410-887-3297 or help@bcpl.net. For the technically inclined, here is a brief comparison of the old and new hardware: Old MAIL.BCPL.NET New MAIL.BCPL.NET ----------------- ----------------- Model: Sun SPARC 1000E Sun Fire V880 Processors: 8 85 MHz SuperSPARC 4 900 MHz UltraSPARC III Cu with 1 MB cache per with 8 MB cache per processor processor RAM: 2 GB 8 GB Disk Controller: Fast/Wide SCSI-2 Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop 20 Megabytes/second 100 Megabytes/second Hard Disks: 36 GB total 438 GB total 5400 RPM 10000 RPM Ethernet Ports: 1 100 Mbit Half Duplex 1 100 Mbit Full Duplex 4 10 Mbit (unused) 1 Gigabit (currently unused) Operating System: Solaris 2.6 Solaris 9 (a.k.a. SunOS 5.6) (a.k.a. SunOS 5.9) Now all I have to do is make sure I'm actually awake at 1:30 Sunday morning. Groan! :-) Chip -- BCPL.NET INTERNET SERVICES 320 York Road Towson, MD 21204-5179 U.S.A. CONTACTS: -------- Web Site: http://www.bcpl.net Administration & Policy: ispadmin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 Sales, Renewals, Account Status: accounts@bcpl.net 410-887-4172 Technical Support (Help Desk): help@bcpl.net 410-887-3297 Usenet News Newsgroup Requests news-admin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 E-Mail & Newsgroup Abuse Reports: abuse@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 Domain Name Service Issues: dnsadmin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 FAX: 410-887-2091