RedBrick are getting a new server. A Dell PowerEdge 2650 to be specific. For the techies: it's a dual 2.8Ghz system, 4x 73Gb SCSI disks, on-board RAID controller, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and so on and so forth: http://tardis.redbrick.dcu.ie/996/www.euro.dell.com Over the next 3 months, we hope to have a reasonably smooth migration to the new server, and it's expected that we will all be logging into it as our main server from July onwards. Prodigy, our current server, won't be going out of use. Instead, we will be distributing services accross our machines to manage load better and to give a better quality of service. This will have some implications for the way you use the server though. There's a rough guide, that we'll keep up to date at: http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/help/the_big_move/ But what you need to know for now is that: * in return for a few slight inconviences everyone is going to get a lot more quota, a better quality of service, webmail and a better mail system. * You should use RedBrick PuTTy or "login.redbrick.dcu.ie" as the host you log in to from now on. * You should change any links/images on your site to use "www.redbrick.dcu.ie" where they would have used "redbrick.dcu.ie", or even better - use relative links * Your website will live at /home/webtree/[letter]/[username] on Prodigy, but we will provide symlinks so that your ~/public_html still works. * Over the month of June we are going to be migrating mail to an entirely new storage/access system. There are a lot of benefits to it, and we feel the benefits outweigh the inconvienence of performing the change. In many cases the moving of mail will be handled automatically, however if you have a complicated set-up, it may involve an admin or helpdesk member going through it with you. One other implication is that we will no longer be able to use procmail to sort mail, however we will have a very capable replacement called "sieve". * The big move will involve at least two periods of downtime. One is expected in early June, and should last only a few short hours. This will be to copy home directory to the new Dell. The other period of downtime will be to re-install prodigy, this will be between 1 and 3 days, during which our mail, web and database services will be unavailable, but we hope to keep it as short as possible. That's it! Any changes that will affect you won't happen for another month or so! If you have any questions about the move and how it will affect you, feel free to contact admins@redbrick.dcu.ie. -- colmmacc@redbrick.dcu.ie PubKey: colmmacc+pgp@redbrick.dcu.ie Web: http://devnull.redbrick.dcu.ie/