On Sunday 9am June 3rd, 2012 we will be updating Conductor's servers. These updates will likely result in an hour or more of extended downtime.
What is Going On?
I will be updating the underlying programming language version. Presently we are running on an older version of Ruby (1.8.7). This version is going to no longer be supported in the coming months. So we are updating to a newer version.
In addition, we will be updating the existing character encoding of the Conductor database. This is not without challenges, and is the reason your sites will be unavailable. We need to take a snapshot of the database and ensure that nothing is running against the database while the updates is happening. With character encoding, it is always possible something unforeseen will happen, so the snapshot is our insurance policy against something catastrophic. And, yes, we have regular snapshots, but I want the latest version before the update happens.
What to Expect?
Conductor sites will likely be unavailable for at least an hour as we work through the upgrades. Once completed your sites will be available again, and from the outside looking in, nothing perceptible have changed. There is evidence that the newer version of Ruby will improve the overall responsiveness of Conductor…but as with most things our mileage may vary.
Questions?
If you have any questions or concerns or really can't afford for your site to be offline at 9am on a Sunday during the summer, please contact webhelp@nd.edu.