Breaking Free

There will be a Server Facility Upgrade tonight (Thursday, December 6th). All servers will be down momentarily at 3 AM (EST - New York Time). We appreciate your patience during this brief interruption of service. Reports will not be available from 11PM to 4AM. We apologize for any inconvenience. — Us

Here’s this broken down into better information for you guys.

At 11PM, we will be taking down the websites. This includes the blog, our homepage, the member center, and the sign up process. Barring catastrophe (and we’re working very hard to bar catastrophe) they all should be back up within an hour.

At around 3AM we will be taking down the login servers. You will not be able to log in to Covenant Eyes. Within 5-10 minutes our login servers will be back up and you will be able to log into Covenant Eyes again.

Of course as anyone who is in the technical world knows, things may not necessarily go as planned. We’ve worked really hard to make sure that everything that can go wrong doesn’t. We’ve also planned this in the least active times for Covenant Eyes Members.

Here’s a few of the tangible (and intangible) benefits you guys will see.

• More reliability. — Our servers are gaining a more reliable power grid. This includes a better and more reliable generator as well as completely re-doing the electrical in the new server room.
• More secure. — Previously, the servers were at a co-location. They will now be operated directly at the Covenant Eyes headquarters.  We have also had, for several years, another colocation facility, which is unaffected by this move.
• Better redundancy of Internet connectivity. — Our Internet connection will now be run in such a way that instead of just one provider at our main NOC, we will have the capability to switch to a second provider. This way when a squirrel chews through our ISP’s fiber line (This happened last summer) you will still be able to log in.  Our other colocation facility already has had redundant electrical backup and Internet connectivity.

I’m going to try and get some before and after pictures and post them up at the end of the night.