Brief scheduled maintenance Monday, August 2 on some servers (completed)

Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time tonight (Monday August 2), several of our hosting servers will be restarted: bender, elzar, farnsworth, lrrr, mom, and seymour.

As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.

No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail on those servers will just be slightly delayed. Customers using other servers will not be affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience this causes and for the short notice. Restarting these servers now is necessary to prevent a potential issue that could cause problems with these servers if a RAID disk needs replacing in the future. (We hope to provide technical details in a future post. The problem — an issue with the GRUB bootloader — is interesting and the solution would be useful to others.)

Update: The maintenance was completed with less than 5 minutes “downtime” per server.