ADMIN: More Network Changes

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TCP)]

[ Apologies to those who have already seen this announcement. ]

Our new T1 link has arrived -- a week earlier than we expected!

That was the *good* news ... :-)

Moving to the new link will require us to make some major changes to
our network. (Our == my ISP. I handle their network engineering.) The
T1 link is provided by a different network carrier, therefore switching
over requires that we renumber all the existing networks (and everything
connected to them). While we just went through this process with the
ve7tcp.ampr.org server a couple of weeks ago fairly painlessly, I don't
expect this one to go quite as smoothly, and it's quite possible that
the server will be unreachable for a couple of days.

Our current schedule has the cutover taking place this coming Wednesday.
This is not a firm date since the move is predicated on our new carrier
getting the network routing configured properly. We might bump it to
Thursday.

Once the server disappears it will be gone for at least four hours, and
possibly longer. During this time, please do NOT send "test" messages
to any of the mailing lists. I will send out an announcement when
everything is once again up and running.

When the system comes back you might find that you cannot connect to
it (via telnet, FTP, or the Web). This is due to an artifact of the
way the Internet domain name servers work. It will take up to a week
for the old nameserver information to expire. During that time your
system might not see the server's new Internet IP address, and instead
try connecting to the old address (which will no longer work). If that
happens you should contact your *local* system administrator and ask
them to reload the nameserver cache. This should flush the old data
out.

Incoming e-mail will not be effected by this change. While the server
is down it's incoming mail will be forwarded automatically to one of
several alternate hosts that will know how to reach the server at it's
new address. Again: don't send "test" messages to the lists.

If, after Wednesday, you want to check your Internet connectivity to
the new address, you can use the "ping" and "traceroute" utilities
provided on most UNIX systems. (If you run Windows, you're on your own :-)
The "finger" service will also be running almost immediately (most PeeCees
have a finger client). If you find that you cannot connect, check the
IP address you are trying to connect to. If it reports 206.12.240.9
you're trying to get to the old address, and should flush your nameserver
cache as described above. (I don't know yet what the new IP address will
be. If your system supports the 'nslookup', 'dig', or 'host' commands,
you can use those to query the nameservers for the new address.)

Finally, if we run into any *major* problems that will keep the server
down for more than a day, I will post an announcement to the
rec.radio.amateur.misc newsgroup.

--lyndon (looking forward to a QRO Internet connection!)

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