Web Server Downtime and Upgrades -- August 26th and 28th, 2009

• Wednesday, August 26th, 6-8am - Upgrade of www.cs.indiana.edu (aka. grouchy)
• Friday, August 28th, 6-8am - Upgrade of cgi.cs.indiana.edu (aka. belfry)

The upgrade of www.cs.indiana.edu involves a hardware upgrade and includes the mitration of all web services from the old Sun Solaris server to a new Linux server. This represents a significant change and we have been working on the migration and porting of services. We believe we have all the major functionality ready to go but there are some services that have been problematic to port so we will be working to resolve those after the upgrade. These old services will be redirected to the legacy server which will be up and running until all dependencies have been resoloved so disruptions should be minimal.

The upgrade of cgi.cs.indiana.edu involves an upgrade of the operating system. There may be user-visible changes as a result of this upgrade and we will have to work through any problems as you encounter them. One significant change will be the upgrade of PHP from V4 to V5 as the default so you should test any php applications to be sure they are compatible.

One of the primary motivations for moving forward immediately with these changes is the decommissioning of the MIT Kerberos server by UITS. This server is scheduled to be taken out of service on September 17th and the old Solaris web server is not compatible with the replacement (Microsoft AD).

There should be few user-visible changes as a result of these upgrades. However, the syntax of .htaccess files is one place where changes are required after the upgrade. The primary difference is that authenticated usernames will now be of the form "username@ADS.IU.EDU" instead of just "username" (as on www.cs.indiana.edu currently) or "username@IU.EDU" (as on cgi.cs.indiana.edu currently). Please see the Kerberos Migration FAQ Page for more information about this change and how to update your .htaccess files.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this downtime.

Affected Servers
================
belfry.cs.indiana.edu  -- aka cgi.cs.indiana.edu
grouchy.cs.indiana.edu  -- aka www.cs.indiana.edu
batson.cs.indiana.edu