A kernel upgrade has been scheduled for Saturday, January 23 at 1 AM EST (-0500 GMT). Servers will be taken offline for approximately 3 – 5 minutes to restart and load the latest kernel (2.6.32.4). Clients that rely on services are encouraged to add a start-up crontab task to ensure services run on server start (Dev > Crontab). Start-up task support was added with apnscp 2 r918 released 2010/01/20.
Two important backend changes will occur, first Broadcom network driver support (bnx2) has greatly improved since the last evaluation that resulted in NIC replacement. TCP offload engine support has been added as well, another major plus to alleviate TCP stack processing by the CPU during nightly filesystem backups. Another maintenance window will be scheduled at a later date to rewire network cabling that currently feed to addon NICs.
Second, the new kernel will resolve an isolated problem experienced with some Ruby 1.9 distributions failing to execute an initialization script prior to invoking the interpreter. Borel and Augend experience this problem, while the other servers do not.