[Linerva-announce] Linerva outage for upgrade next week

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Hello,

We're reserving an outage window between 6 AM on Tuesday, January 28 and 6 
AM on Friday, January 31 for an upgrade to Linerva.

The upgrade will most likely take the form of moving the "linerva.mit.edu" 
and "linux.mit.edu" names to IS&T's athena.dialup.mit.edu pool, and 
retirement of the Linerva service. Our goals with the Linerva project were 
primarily to provide a Linux-based dialup for general use to the MIT 
community. Since athena.dialup has been running Debathena on Ubuntu for a 
few years now, this goal is complete and provided by IS&T's full-time 
server operations team. athena.dialup is a pool of servers currently 
running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS codename "precise", 64-bit.

We're still working out details of the transition with IS&T server ops, 
and it is entirely possible that logistical difficulties will prevent us 
from completing this transition before the end of IAP. Should that happen, 
we will still need to upgrade Linerva, as our current OS (Debian 6.0 
codename "squeeze") will end its support lifecycle during the spring term. 
In that case, we will be upgrading to Debian 7 codename "wheezy".

We'll send a follow-up announcement with precise timing once we have final 
plans, and we will also send messages to all logged-in users. We thank you 
for your support of Linerva over the years, and as always, if you have any 
questions or commments, feel free to contact us at linerva at mit.edu.

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
SIPB Linerva team
linerva at mit.edu