[M5Hosting] Planned Maintenance 11/19/05 - Action Required

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear Happy M5 Hosting Customer,

         The last planned maintenance message I sent to you back in 
July, I started off by announcing we had just signed the papers to 
double our rack space. Remarkably, we have just about sold out of 
that space too ! This morning I write to you to tell you we have 
signed the papers to consolidate the space we had before July, the 
space we moved into in July and to add another 50% more space. Wait, 
consolidate ? Does that mean move ?
         Yep. We need to move everything to a new area of the data 
center. Every switch, every server, every fan and network 
cable.  This means physical movement of everything. This also means 
some downtime for everyone.
         We are also taking this opportunity to upgrade our border 
firewall and a few other infrastructure items. The network has been 
up uninterrupted for 510 days as of this moment. The last time the 
network was down was to install our border firewall, 510 days ago. 
Where were you 510 days ago ? People can meet, fall in love, get 
married and have a baby in less time than that !
         We have pre-wired the new rack space as much as possible to 
minimize the downtime due to the move.

Who:            All M5 Customers (Shared Hosting, Colo, Dedicated 
Servers, Network Monitoring, DNS and e-mail services)
What:           Total outage while everything moves about 75-100 feet 
to the West.
When:           Saturday 11/19/05 at 8:00pm PST, 11:00pm EST
                 Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 4:00am UTC/GMT
Duration:       Less than 4hrs (hoping for 2hrs)


Colocation and Dedicated Server customers:
         If you prefer to make sure your applications are shut down 
before the move, please be sure they are shut down by 8pm PST. We 
don't have passwords to your servers, so we can't do it for you. We 
will do what we can to make sure the systems come down as cleanly as 
possible, but it would be best if you either take them down (init 0, 
or halt) your servers before the move, or arrange for us to do this 
for you at the time of the move (please email support at 
m5hosting.com to arrange this. After the move, we will need to 
reconfigure Cacti graphs for bandwidth utilization. Statistics may 
not be accurate for a few days and some history will be lost.

Shared Hosting and E-mail Services customers:
         We will take the systems down gently. No action is required 
on your part. Any email sent to your domains on our server during the 
move will be delayed for a few hours. Typical email server 
configuration is to retry to deliver mail several times if 
unsuccessful. This retry interval increases after each failure, and 
retries typically occur for a week. You will most likely receive all 
mail sent to you during this time, within a few hours of the servers 
being available again.

Network Monitoring customers:
         We will not be monitoring your network during this time. 
Monitoring will resume as quickly as possible.

DNS Services customers:
         Secondary name server services will be down, your Primary 
name servers will resolve names. Primary name server services will be 
down, your secondary name servers will resolve names. If all of your 
name servers are on our network, name resolution will not occur for 
your domains.


         Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank you, our 
customers. By being our customer, you honor us with your trust and 
your business. Thank you very much, and we will always respect the 
trust you place in us.
         If you have any issues whatsoever, regarding the move or 
anything else, please send us a message to support[at]m5hosting.com

Thanks,
Mike


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Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com

You can have your own custom Dedicated Server up and running today !
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