Scheduled ITRC Forums downtime

[Jeff Siegle]

Dear members of the ITRC community,

Today Forums will undergo some downtime in order to make some much-needed performance improvements to the service. We?ve heard consistently from you that performance and availability (ie: SSI, 404 errors) are the most critical issues with the service, and we?ve been working hard to fix those issues.

*** In order to deploy the changes, Forums will be down for approximately 6 hours. This downtime will start at approximately 12:30 AM GMT (7 hours from now) on Friday the 19th of October.

There is a second update I?d also like to provide: Forum URLs will again change.

As many of you are aware, on Friday, September 28th, the ITRC Forums database was reindexed as a first step towards improving overall performance. Consequently, the index numbers/locations of URLs in the database changed when the indexes were rebuilt. We realized the disruption that this caused to your use of the service.

With this planned downtime, we will remove the cuplrit of the past and potential future URL changes: Index numbers (ie: the 5-digit number like 11864 or 11866) inside the URL string. So, the URLs will again change, but this modification should prevent this from ever happening again. As well, when we sent information out to many of you via email in the first week of October following the first URL change, we noted that the best fix was to remove the template ID entirely. If you followed those directions at that time, then you should have no issue with this latest change. Lastly, the template ID in community members profile page (ie: http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/UserProfile/1,11913,CA483082,00.html ) will change as well.

As well, we realize that the Forums Search is still problematic. We?re still working on fixing that area as well!

We hope the enhancements that are released as a part of this downtime bring significant performance gains in our service. Please let us know how you find the enhancement by emailing us at: itrc_forums@hp.com.

We?re working hard to listen to your needs and act on them. We thank you for making this service so successful. With thousands of messages a month, we?re glad you find this service and the ITRC a critical tool in doing your jobs better.

Thanks again for your patience and your ongoing support as we work hard to make this community gathering place the premier location for IT Professionals to come together on the web.

Best regards-
Jeff Siegle
Dan Gazzaniga
ITRC Forums