Conductor is Moving!

On Thursday evening, Conductor is moving to a new home. This means new servers, a new hosting company, and a bunch of new opportunities. With over 160 websites in Conductor these days, moving is a tricky process.

Schedule: Thursday July 1

Why are we moving Conductor?

Simple: more power, more stability, and more security. We’ve worked with OIT and Procurement to find a hosting provider who meets our ever-increasing security standards. Moving will allow us to host more sites, serve pages faster, and store more sensitive information. We’ve also been working on adding password-protection features, and the move is a big part of that.

How long does the move take?

We have been configuring and testing the new servers for two weeks. On Thursday evening, we’ll shut down the admin and copy the latest version of all of the files over to the new servers. Then the OIT will point the aliases (______.nd.edu) to the new location. This will take effect in just minutes for users on campus, and up to a few hours for users off-campus (this is why we’re shutting down the admin area).

Will my site be down?

If the move goes smoothly (as it has so far), your visitors will experience zero downtime. But just in case something goes awry, we’re handling the move on a Thursday evening, when traffic is very low.

However, the Conductor admin area will be offline for several hours. While we migrate, we need to prevent issues where your users are seeing the new site but you are making edits to the old one. Fortunately, very few people use the Conductor admin after regular business hours, so we hope this won’t inconvenience too many of our users.

What if I find a problem?

During the migration period, we expect some quirks and will be working feverishly to fix anything we find. Once we are done, we’ll send an “all clear” email to let you know how it went. But if you find something after you get that email, please contact us at webhelp@nd.edu. We’ll be up late, just to keep an eye on things.