[rhn-users] Outage announcement for Red Hat Network

[Todd Warner]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Eric Eisenhart wrote:

> Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > Red Hat Network will be unavailable as it undergoes major infrastructure
> > upgrades during the following outage windows:
> >                                                                                 
> >   Thursday, August 26th, 8:00pm through 1:00am, U.S. Eastern Time
> >   Tuesday, August 31st, 8:00pm through midnight, U.S. Eastern Time
> >                                                                                 
> > Thank you for your patience as we complete these upgrades to improve the
> > quality of Red Hat Network service.
> 
> Are there any plans for the future to announce outages of this type more 
> in advance?  If not, why not?
> 
> In this particular instance, the last-minute RHN outage was only a minor 
> inconvenience that delayed patching a few noncritical systems, but in 
> order to patch some of our systems we need to announce a maintenance 
> window, etc.  It'd be essential to know about planned outages at least 
> 24 hours in advance, preferably a week or two (or more) in advance. 
> Especially with the 8pm EST (5pm PST) time, which
> 
> Additionally, the mechanisms used to announce this were inadequate.  The 
> only announcements of this outage were on the day of the outage and 
> either via an overly high volume and frequently off-topic list 
> (rhn-users); via a recently created, unannounced and hidden list 
> (rhn-outage-list); or via the website. So we didn't see the announcement 
> of the outage until the outage was happening.  Nobody at our site logs 
> into RHN daily and I would have expected an announcement of an outage to 
> go out from RHN to all RHN users (much like the "Red Hat Linux End of 
> Life" email back in May or any of the Errata alerts do) and not via a 
> discussion list.  I only heard about the (intentionally secret? 
> accidentally secret?) rhn-outage-list afterwards.
> 
> I will say, though, that I like the new behavior of up2date much better 
> than the crashes and tracebacks RHN downtime used to produce.

I will poke around as to why folks don't know about the outage list.
Thanks for the feedback.

-- 
____________
 /odd Warner                                    <taw@{redhat,pobox}.com>
                Head Geek, QA/Sust.Eng. - Red Had Network
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"When the going gets tough, you're halfway through a cliche" -Greg Dean(?)