One of our main servers, xtej1118, died last night, resulting in a service interruption of approximately four hours while systems were moved to another machine.

Debian GNU/Linux has just released a major version upgrade. All customer servers and workstations will eventually need upgrading.

Currently, testing is being performed on contingencies encountered during the upgrade process which may adversely effect a smooth upgrade on customer systems.

After testing is complete, customers will be contacted to determine their plans or needs, and subsequent upgrades to their systems will be scheduled if desired.

We are very excited about this release. It's been a long time coming.

Tomorrow morning beginning around 0100 PST people may experience brief and intermittent service outages not lasting for more than one hour, as servers are upgraded with security patches.

There will be brief outages tomorrow morning, beginning at 01:00 PST, as servers are upgraded with new kernels.

Customer servers will also be upgraded over the next few days. Scheduling will be handled on an individual basis.

Servers were down for a good part of the evening after midnight last night until noon this morning as a result of complications encountered with data on the logical volumes of the primary raid arrays during upgrade.

The arrays have been successfully rebuilt without any data loss. I'm sorry for the terribly long downtime.

The IP addresses of tertiary DNS and backup mail routing servers will be changing. These changes must be reflected in customer domain registrations and server definitions to ensure that these backup services remain in effect for customers.

Where Orbis Lumen provides direct IT support, these changes will be made for you without any intervention on your organization's part.

Customers will be contacted with details of the changes needed, specific to their situation.

The GNU project, the origin of the Free Software movement, has turned 25 years old today. For a brief insight into the history and ramifications of this movement, check out http://orbum.net/mark/2008/09/18/freedom-is-free/

We all owe a great deal to these people.

Users may experience brief and intermittent service outages beginning at 01:00 Friday Aug 22 as servers are updated.

The upgrades should not take more than 30 minutes to complete.

All Orb Debian servers will be updated to the latest revision of Debian today. Very brief service outages of one form or another might be noticed during this upgrade process.

Our main servers will be upgraded with security fixes to the kernels this morning. Brief partial outages may be noticed.

Customer systems will be upgraded overnight Wednesday 11 June.