Apis Networks

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.

PHP4 will be removed from servers on December 30, 2009 beginning at 1 AM EST (-0400 GMT).  PHP5.3, compiled with mysqlnd, will replace legacy PHP4 servers accessible on port 9000.  Clients that rely on PHP4 have been individually contacted, while all others will remain unaffected by this transition.

Following installation of PHP 5.3, PostgreSQL will be upgraded from 8.2 to 8.4.  During this leg of the upgrade database access will be briefly taken offline to update database definitions.  E-mail delivery will be interrupted momentarily for 1 – 3 minutes while the database is offline.  E-mail sent during the window will be redelivered within a hour.

Note: this plan has changed from the original, which suggested upgrading the primary server, after a client expressed concern over Drupal PHP 5.3 incompatibility.  Replacing PHP4, which was discontinued by its developers on December 31, 2007, will affect significantly fewer clients than replacing 5.2, which is the latest version supported by some applications that many clients utilize.