Right after weekly backup completion we'll start with kernel upgrades for all our servers in order to protect them from the recently released kernel exploits.

There should not be any major downtime excepr server reboots in case things will go as they should.

Thank you for your patience.

Serge,
I am sure we all appreciate this advance notification about these outages.
However, would you be able to provide a little finer detail on the dates and times?

For example, "server10 will be down on 12-16-03 between 0800 and 1200 EST", "server11 will be down on ...." and so on.

Since these kernel upgrades are totally elective on your part, there's no reason you should not be able to dictate / predict the times the outages will occur, within at least a few hours.

We do these sorts of notifications ALL THE TIME where I work. We provide schedules a week in advance. We also do EVERYTHING in our power to limit outages to "off hours" for our sites around the world. I realize there's no such thing as "off hours" for internet websites.

Thanks.
JimC

Jim

I understand that you want to know exactly when outage will occur. The problem is as I said kernel upgrades were to be applied in order to protect from exploit. We already had hack attempt at server 16 from the hacker who bought a hosting from us and then tried to exploit teh server and install rootkit.

That's why we decided to apply upgrades immediately after weekly backup in order to have a fresh backup of all server if something will go wrong and upgrade kernels as soon as possible.
We have no ETA on when bacup finishes since it designed not to make too much load on CPU and is performed at time when CPU is less loaded. Thus backup can take from 6-10 hours to several days.

At the moment we have kernels upgraded on all servers both dedicated and shared upgraded with no downtime.

Serge,
I am sure none of us (clients) know when you complete weekly backups on any servers.
Is there some profound reason you cannot or do not WANT to provide SPECIFIC dates for each server???

PLEASE .......

Thanks.
JimC

The only exact time we have is the date backups are started.
It is Sunday 4 AM GMT.

Depending on the amount of data that should be archieved, server load, connection speed to the offsite location time can greatly veried. From several hours to several days. That's why we cannot know ecxact date when backups are finished.

This weekend they finished on Sunday - Monday morning and we applied kernel apgrades right at the time backups were finished.
The longest time we had for backup processing was 4 days Sunday night till wednesday night.

Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks