down time

[Angela Marie Thomas]

Now that my quick message went out, I can send a longer one.

First, I find the lack of notice completely unacceptable.
Not everyone is located on the east coast.  We require *at least*
24 hours notice, probably more, so we can notify all the necessary
people in all the different time zones about the change.  We've
gone through IP changes several times now and each has resulted
in extended down time due to lack of communication or forgetting
to change some obscure configuration file.  Let's learn from our
past mistakes.

You obviously knew this was going to happen some time in the future.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any discussion of this on the
sourceware sysadmin mailing list or the overseers list.  There are
a number of things that need to be done when we change the
IP address.  Because we know this has been an issue in the past,
we need a plan up front so we can identify everything that needs
to change and who should be notified.

Not only is the IP address changing, but the machine is physically
moving as well.  This sort of thing must be coordinated with me so
we can ensure the backups are as fresh as possible relative to when
the machine is taken down.  We don't want to lose a day or more of
work just because we were too stupid to coordinate times.

The timing sucks.  10am Pacific on a work day with no notice.
There's a pretty big chunk of gcc folks in this timezone who will
not be very happy to find out they can't do anything and don't
know why.  It would suck the same way for other timezones.  A move
like this should probably happen on a Sat or a calculated very low
usage time.  Sat is good because it's a weekend day everywhere.
Sun starts pushing into the beginning of the week in AU.

And since I feel it bears repeating, I'll note again that it is
completely an utterly unacceptable to send out such short notice
*especially* when the work will begin BEFORE A LOT OF FOLKS ARE
EVEN AWAKE!

--Angela