I have scheduled some upgrades to our current system with our provider and they should help us out significantly.

We may have some down time as the upgrades go live, but I will try to announce those in advance if possible. That is to say, if I don't receive a warning, don't panic if the skull disappears for a bit.

We will be making some more visible updates in the (relatively) near future and will announce those as they occur.

Thanks for your patience.

We are up temporarily while the initial backup is being completed. We'll go back down for the second stage of the upgrades.

Note: you should not lose anything you gain during the up-time, since the backup will be refreshed after it is completed. I'm not sure how much warning we'll receive, so save often.

Our provider realized that the vendor of the backup software was indexing the entire OS image, which was causing the big delay. They estimate about an hour to finish things up if we decided to go forward.

I put in the order to go ahead and finish it since we're down already. Doing this at 4am would be better for downtime, but we're better equipped to deal with these issues when we're wide awake.

I'll throw out a learning AND experience bonus when we're done. Sorry again for the delay.

The migration is taking longer than expected because of the backup process--that will no longer be an issue once we are upgraded, and is one of the reasons we are doing this upgrade (file transfers were no fun). So we still have a little longer to go (perhaps 30 minutes).

On the positive side, we are transitioning from 100Mbps to 1000Mbps, so speed will no longer be a factor.

Thanks for all the hard work.

These things always take longer than predicted (what migration in the history of migrations hasn't?), but this will be good for CF.

We were doing a system update and when we applied it to our test environment it took 3 hours.

So we scheduled out our smoke testing team to be available 2 hours after the start of update start (we got folks in 3 continents so scheduling this out is a bit rough). They start the update and instead of 3 hours it takes 30 minutes...

So in the ten minutes it took me to drive into the office (I was coming in way earlier than the team) I got 12 paniced voicemails saying we need to start NOW to minimize client downtime.

Then I got reamed out for 2 weeks.

All the while we still finished up 2 hours before our scheduled window was up :P

The upgrade is in progress, the ETA for its completion is 20-40 minutes. I'll kick off a bonus when it is complete to mitigate the downtime.