[rhn-users] Outage announcement for Red Hat Network

[Eric Eisenhart]

Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> Red Hat Network will be unavailable as it undergoes major infrastructure
> upgrades during the following outage windows:
>                                                                                 
>   Thursday, August 26th, 8:00pm through 1:00am, U.S. Eastern Time
>   Tuesday, August 31st, 8:00pm through midnight, U.S. Eastern Time
>                                                                                 
> Thank you for your patience as we complete these upgrades to improve the
> quality of Red Hat Network service.

Are there any plans for the future to announce outages of this type more 
in advance?  If not, why not?

In this particular instance, the last-minute RHN outage was only a minor 
inconvenience that delayed patching a few noncritical systems, but in 
order to patch some of our systems we need to announce a maintenance 
window, etc.  It'd be essential to know about planned outages at least 
24 hours in advance, preferably a week or two (or more) in advance. 
Especially with the 8pm EST (5pm PST) time, which

Additionally, the mechanisms used to announce this were inadequate.  The 
only announcements of this outage were on the day of the outage and 
either via an overly high volume and frequently off-topic list 
(rhn-users); via a recently created, unannounced and hidden list 
(rhn-outage-list); or via the website. So we didn't see the announcement 
of the outage until the outage was happening.  Nobody at our site logs 
into RHN daily and I would have expected an announcement of an outage to 
go out from RHN to all RHN users (much like the "Red Hat Linux End of 
Life" email back in May or any of the Errata alerts do) and not via a 
discussion list.  I only heard about the (intentionally secret? 
accidentally secret?) rhn-outage-list afterwards.

I will say, though, that I like the new behavior of up2date much better 
than the crashes and tracebacks RHN downtime used to produce.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart <eric.eisenhart at sonoma.edu>
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator
Office: Schulz 1050A, (707) 664-3099
AIM: ericeisenhart, ICQ: 156218985
Sonoma State University, IT