Breaking Free

Last night in a maintenance window that started at 11 PM and just finished, the technology team moved the majority of our servers from the NOC in Corunna into the NOC in our new location. It was a great team effort including Mike Cross and Jim Scheffler both leading the way - plus Rick Finn, Zach Spencer, John McKnight, Jordan Wertz, Scott McClurg, Collin Rose, Bill Spencer and myself. We moved over 15 servers, added a new fiber line connection, rewired our internal network, and put them all into the new NOC.

The new NOC is a vast improvement. It is set up with uninterruptible power supplies and a generator that will automatically kick in immediately upon any kind of power outage (zero server outage). We tested it yesterday and it works great. We can all sleep better tonight knowing we are in a much better position to handle any type of power outage, and before too long we will also have a redundant internet connection so that squirrels chewing the fiber line in Vernon will not affect our internet access (our redundant servers in our other colocation facility kept our customers connected at that time, but the added redundancy is a vast improvement).

At this writing, we are about 12 hours behind on scoring new URL’s for accountability logs. This means that user reports will not show activity in the past 12 hours or so. We should be catching up slowly during the day and I expect to be completely caught up by the wee hours of the morning on Saturday.

As far as I can tell there are no other problems to report. Other than being behind in scoring new URL’s, impact to our members was essentially zero; all members were able to log in except for a few minutes around 3:30 this morning, reports are up and running, the member center and web site are going strong, signups are working, and the phones all are up and operational. In fact, as of 9:30 this morning, our customer support had not received a single call owing to level of service!

I hope this is somewhat coherent,as I am a little bit tired. I really want to thank all involved in the move, and especially Mike and Jim. They worked very hard and did a great job in getting the NOC completed in a shortened schedule, and came in just under budget (last I heard :-)). We will have one more maintenance window some time next week to bring over a couple of remaining servers and to do a little more rewiring in the new NOC.

Scott Hammersley/Technical Director