Servers offline on the 27th

[Jean-François Wauthy]

Le dimanche 25 septembre 2016 à 18:12 +0200, houghi a écrit :

> Indeed very great of them. These kind of things do not get enough 
> attention, I think.
> I even looked on the website and could not find anything. Could well
> be that either XFCE or UNamur or both decides against it for, most
> likely, valid reasons.

I think it was pointed out at some point in time in the about Xfce
dialog but I might be wrong. I don't think the University currently
cares communicating about that.
> 
> > 
> > I think this is the first planned maintenance there requiring
> > server shutdown.

I've found that we already had such planned maintenance 5 years ago.

> You also made me curious. What hardware are you running on? Is that
> info available anywhere? If not (or you are unwilling to share for
> security or other reasons), no worries.

It is refurbished hardware. We have a Sun V20z, a Sun Fire X4200 and a
HP server using a coreboot BIOS in order to have support for
virtualization. An old Cisco 2950 (with some non working ports) is used
for networking them. We are connected to the Internet via the belgian
research network (Belnet).

> I am sorry that you think that what I wrote was in any way 
> condescending. In no way or for was that the case.
> I actually think it is a pity that a backup system is not available.

Having a backup system would be a plus but as I explained it requires
resources, consistency and time. As you apparently know these are not
easy to find. We had web mirroring in the past but it was complicated
to manage while not really filling an important need. The archive has a
mirroring system (based on Mirrorbrain) that is low maintenance (if a
mirror is out of sync, it won't redirect to it for the missing files)
but it requires a redirector which will down on Tuesday.

Regards
-- 
Jean-François Wauthy <pollux at xfce.org>