Sysadmin/Announcing downtime

How to announce service outages

StatusNet

Parties interested in receiving these notifications subscribe to our Infrastructure_Team/Contacts#Services_status feed.

To quickly notify people about unplanned outages, send status updates to [1] crafted like these examples:

 !sugarlabsstatus {wiki,www,planet,lists}.sugarlabs.org: maintenance downtime for solarsail in 10mins
 !sugarlabsstatus {wiki,www,planet,lists}.sugarlabs.org: solarsail going down now
 !sugarlabsstatus {wiki,www,planet,lists}.sugarlabs.org: back up
 !sugarlabsstatus beamrider: machine is unreachable, pls contact co-lo admins

Please do not abuse this service, as some users configure their account to forward notifications as text messages to their mobile phones and may have to pay for each SMS received.

hosted@sl.org

The alias "hosted @ sugarlabs.org" forwards outage notifications to several individuals and mailing lists who have services hosted at Sugar Labs. The alias is handled by our MX, therefore it won't work if Machine/sunjammer itself is down.

Use this to notify about ahead-of-time about planned maintenance and possible service outages.

Here's an example of what a notification may look like:

Subject: develer.com: switch to new uplink, Aug 13 23:00 UTC

The FSF sysadmins are going to relocate our virtual machine Sunjammer
today in the evening.

The new host has faster processors, twice as much memory, a faster RAID1
array and generally better hardware.  The downtime is projected to last
15-30 minutes, but it may last longer in case of unexpected issues.

Apologies for any inconvenience,

   -- Your dedicated BOFH

Please format the subject line like in the example, provide detailed explanation of what services are affected, along with an estimate of time required to complete the work in average and worst-case scenarios.