[TriLUG] upgrading pilot - 4/20

[Alan Porter]

PLANNED OUTAGE THIS WEEKEND

This weekend, we will be upgrading pilot.trilug.org from Ubuntu 10.04
LTS to 12.04 LTS (a long-overdue upgrade -- that's what you get when
your sysadmin staff is all over-committed volunteers).

Several services will be unavailable during the upgrade.

  * trilug.org & NCSA web sites
  * trilug.org mail
  * TriLUG, NCSA, TriPUG mailman lists
  * shell access
  * primary DNS for

The plan is to tackle this on Saturday from 10am to 3pm.

If this causes any real problems, let us know (porter at trilug.org or
steering at trilug.org).


BACKUPS

In preparation for the upgrade, we have made a complete backup of
pilot's filesystem.

However, our unofficial policy is that /home is our end users'
responsibility.  If you're concerned about the stuff in your $HOME, then
you might want to make your own backup.  For example, this is a script
that I run every night from a machine at my house:

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ] ; then echo "not root" ; exit ; fi
    site="trilug"
    user="porter"
    machine="login.trilug.org"
    date > $site.log
    mkdir -p $site/$user
    rsync -e "ssh -i keys/trilug-backup.pri" -xavz --delete
    --numeric-ids --bwlimit=25 $user@$machine:./ $site/$user/ >> $site.log
    date >> $site.log

Note the "bwlimit" option.  It's very likely that your download speed at
your house is 10x as fat as our outgoing pipe at SunGard.  So if you
don't limit your bandwidth, people are going to notice.  Since I run
this script every night, and because it only grabs stuff that has
changed, it tends to take just a minute or two each night.

We ran a similar script to make the full backup -- with the bandwidth
limit, that ran for two weeks.  :-)

-- 
# Alan Porter