Sunday June 28th: server maintenance
On Sunday the 28th of June 2009 we will perform maintenance on our Copernica servers. We will update operating systems and install security patches. During this maintenance, some websites may be offline for a very short time.
The maintenance does not affect the functionality of the application. We only apply security updates, we don't release new features.
Installation new 'PHP' version
There's a new version available of the programming language PHP. We will install this new version on our servers. This version has some bug fixes and security updates. Check http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_10.php for more information.
Installation new operating system for webservers
The operating system of our webservers which host Copernica Marketing Software, will be replaced by another version. The current operating system is no longer supported, so no more security updates will be released. This poses a risk. Switching to Ubuntu version 8.04 will eliminate this risk.
This update will cause the webservers to be offline for several hours. Because of the Copernica network design, all website requests will be handled by our remaining webservers. During the maintenance the load balancer will by-pass the server which is updated and reroute the website requests to the least busy webserver. We therefore expect no offline time for websites so neither end-users nor website visitors will notice the webservers being updated.
Please note: some users have registered their own domain name which doesn't correctly link to our load balancer, but directly to one of our webservers. When updating that webserver, website requests will not be rerouted to our remaining webservers.
How do you know if this is cause for you? Your application is not configured correctly when a yellow bar is visible at the top of the application which contains the following text: 'The domain XYZ is not routed via the load balancer. It is not possible to handle peak loads.' In this case, the maintenance can cause some offline time. You can prevent this by updating you configuration on time.
