Planned 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

[Wodisch]

Hello Jeff and Dan,

that's very good news! Really!
Especially since I will be sleeping while you do it :-)
Hoping to see the forums faster then ever tomorrow morning...

TIA,
Wodisch

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Jeff and Dan;

This goes a long, long way to providing the proactive advisories I have so long begged to see.

With my regards and my thanks!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

Jeff,

Thank you thank you thank you!

I really appreciate you sending the notice out so we know to expect the forums to be unavailable and we don't panic when they are not. We know we'll have to wait to get our "fix".

Thanks again and looking forward to seeing the results of your efforts.

[harry d brown jr]

We definitely have the need for speed! We'll mostly suffer withdrawls from having the site down, but with prozac we will survive! Can't wait for the "new" site to come into play!

live free or die!

[linuxfan]

Hi Jeff/Dan,

Its good to see that the voices of the people is being heard.

Keep up the good work and down with 404 errors ;)

I guess now James can reach the goal of 20K by the end of the year with relative ease ;)

-Regards
Ramesh

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Jeff and Dan:

Oh, does this mean I can get some sleep???

...JRF...

[Stefan Farrelly]

Yeaaahhhh, looking forward to hitting that turbo button when it comes backup tomorrow !!

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Thanks Jeff. I think we all need the time off anyway.

Clay

[John Bolene]

Downtime notification? Amazing and thanks.

Looking forward to subsecond response. LOL

[someone_4]

I am looking forward to a faster site!
what about a fix for the search?

Richard

[Victor_5]

Cool!

So that we can enjoy the forum with higher speed, thank you so much!

Shawn

[Jeff Siegle]

Hi all,

Glad to hear that this proactive communication was helpful for all!

Richard, regarding your point, we are trying to fix search- this reindexing of URLs has messed up som eof the search results and we're working to get those ironed out as well. Stay tuned.

Just wanted to pop this thread back up to the top one more time for those that may have missed it earleir today. Forums sould be coming down in the next 60 minutes or so.

Regards-
Jeff

[Santosh Nair_1]

Jeff,

Thanks for the heads up. Its so good to hear about planned downtime more than 5 minutes before it happens (as many ISP don't tend to do). Hope all goes well with the updates and hope to fully utilize the new improvements. Thanks for the wonderful service.

-Santosh