Re: planning gerrit downtime

On Sat, Nov 03, 2012 at 11:43:09AM +0100, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> for a RAM upgrade of the physical host, I plan a gerrit downtime for
> next Monday. Unfortunately, I cannot schedule that exactly, since it
> also depends on when our ISP has time.
>
> I plan to do a clean shutdown of gerrit, then order the upgrade with
> our ISP, and expect a downtime of 1-3 hours.
>
> Such long downtimes are usually not desirable. ;-) However, is
> Monday a specifically bad time for doing so? Scheduling to the
> weekend won't work because of our ISP's working times.
>
> If you do *not* want me to do the upgrade on Monday, or if you have
> specific time wishes (between 9 and 1500 UTC) please let me know,
> keeping me in Cc, since I'm not subscribed to the list.

Given these circunstances starting the downtime on 1200UTC would have the least
impact. Corp. devs usually pick up their stuff in the morning and push it back
in the afternoon, volunteers do push their stuff in the evenings and on the
weekend usually.

Following that, the best downtimes IMHO are:

- weekday european night (0100-0600 UTC)
- weekday noon (1200-1400 UTC)

we dont get the first so lets go with the second. Also it would be great to
have at least 48 hours of warning on the relevant lists before, so maybe:

- announce on Sunday
- that there will be a scheduled outage on Tuesday between 1200-1800UTC
- we are expecting the host to be up again much earlier around 1400UTC but to
  prepare for unexpected events we extend the range to 1800UTC and ask users to
  take the steps to accomodate for that
- freedesktop and gitorious will still be available as readonly mirrors all the time

Best,

Bjoern