[[!meta title="Outage information - Saturday, Jan. 5, 2008"]]
Last updated: Jan. 5, 4:40 PM

Between the hours of 10 PM to 3 AM this Saturday night, the scripts
servers will be moved to a new UPS and network connection. This
should not cause a noticeable disruption in the web scripts or mail
scripts service. There may be a brief disruption of the SQL service
as it is moved. (If you see a website that reports that it cannot
connect to the database, try reloading the page in a few seconds.)
All services run on redundant servers for reliability, so it is
expected that we will be able to avoid interrupting the services
while we complete the move. However, in the event of an unforeseen
failure, there may be a longer outage (15 minutes or more) for the
duration of the move.

Updates to service status will be posted on IS&T’s
[3down website](http://3down.mit.edu/). Messages will also be sent
to zephyr instance “consult”. (To subscribe to this instance, type
**zctl sub message consult \\\*** on Athena. You may need to run
**zwgc -ttymode** first, if you are logged in remotely.)

The scripts.mit.edu services have been designed with reliability in
mind, and we are taking extra technical measures to reduce and
hopefully eliminate downtime related to Saturday night’s move.
However, we are not in a position to make service guarantees, and
scripts should not be used to run critical applications that cannot
tolerate downtime. (Recall that every Sunday morning at 6 am, there
is a 10-minute outage for sites from the athena.mit.edu AFS cell
when the AFS servers restart.)

Service announcements are sent in advance to the
[scripts-announce](http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/scripts-announce)
mailing list, a low-traffic Mailman list open to the public. (The
list receives less than one message per month on average.)

— The SIPB scripts.mit.edu team  
[scripts@mit.edu](mailto:scripts@mit.edu)