Subject: Testing IETF Server Failover Procedures in April 2011

From: IETF Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:15:39 -0400

Dear IETF Community:

The IETF Secretariat runs a dedicated server for the IETF in Fremont,
California.  The IETF Secretariat also runs a "hot standby" server for
the IETF in Orlando, Florida.  Fortunately, we've never had an outage
significant enough to require a failover.  But we want to make sure
that everything would work if it is needed.  To that end, we are going
to test the failover procedures in April.

This failover will be controlled, ensuring that no data is lost.  In
addition, some upgrades will be installed to the primary server once we
are certain that the backup server is working well for everyone.  This
will result in some planned outage periods:

 Mon 11-Apr-2011 1600 EDT -- Primary Server goes down
 Mon 11-Apr-2011 1800 EDT -- Orlando Server comes up
 Tue 26-Apr-2011 1600 EDT -- Orlando Server goes down
 Tue 26-Apr-2011 1800 EDT -- Upgraded primary Server comes up

In preparation, please ensure that your work that depends on the IETF
server is done well before those outage periods.  In addition, please
ensure that you are addressing the IETF servers by their proper
universal names like "www.ietf.org" and "datatracker.ietf.org".  
Please do not use server specific names like "core3.amsl.com".

An extensive amount of pre-production testing was done, nevertheless
we are being cautious.  We are planning a two week period of time
operating on the backup server.  This will make us more confident that
we can handle an actual emergency.  Be assured that the Secretariat
staff will be monitoring things continuously, and we will be working on
problems as we encounter them.

In the end, we will have an upgraded server and confidence in our
failover plan.

We ask for your patience, and thank you for your support, during this
upcoming outage.

Thanks for your assistance,
  Russ Housley
  IETF Chair