Maintenance Schedule

What to expect

During any maintenance windows you should expect 0 – 3 short service interruptions. Some updates require processes to be restarted, some require the server to be restarted, and some don’t require anything other than installation. Thus, there might not be any interruption at all, or there might be more than one. It all depends on the updates.

To be clear, all interruptions should be short. No more than 15 minutes, and seldom more than 5 minutes.

Since our services run on several different servers, we have to install updates on all those servers. Thus we cannot give an exact time when an interruption might occur. That’s why is a “window” and not a “time”.

Why we interrupt you

Security and reliability. By keeping the software running the services up to date, we limit potential openings for malicious use. The updates also fix bugs that could cause our services to have problems. Basically, by having a few short interruptions during an expected time slot, we prevent future long, unexpected, interruptions. That makes all our lives easier.

Affected services

If you have a scheduling conflict

If you have something happening during the maintenance window, and you cannot deal with any potential interruptions, please let us know as soon as you can. We will work around your schedule. But we have to know about it first.

2 thoughts on “Maintenance Schedule”

  1. Hey there, so I was wondering why the website gets so slow around registration time. I’m aware that the server is extremely busy but why don’t we have a larger server or a temporary server or something? Isn’t there some big building somewhere that leases out server space or something? Just curious.

    1. There’s actually three big websites on campus: the main website, Moodle, and MyLane. So when we consider the website getting slow, we need to think about which website is having the issue. Usually, when we’re talking about the website being slow around registration, we’re actually talking about MyLane, which is a totally different team (with a different set of servers) than the one doing this redesign – this blog is just concerned with the main website. I passed your concerns over to the appropriate team, and they assured me they’re working on it. But with a system as big as MyLane, the answers aren’t easy – it’s going to take some time.

      On the other hand, if you’re talking about the main Lane website at http://www.lanecc.edu or www2.lanecc.edu, then that’s my team’s job to fix. We haven’t seen any performance problems yet, but just to be sure, we’re piloting a few different technologies right now to make it faster than ever.

      If you’re interested in what it takes to make a site really fast, you should take a look at High Scalability, a blog that talks about some of the different architectures that allow a website to scale from a few hundred to several million users.

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