We are going to run an upgrade of our servers from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5. During the next week we are going to be migrating the whole web, blog, forums, etc. The way to achieve this is creating a new IP range for our servers and move the whole content there. The web names will be kept the same.

In essence this should not affect the current web, nor will it improve the current functionality in any possible way. The servers will be online 100% and there will be a small temporal dis-adjustment due to the nature of the net. While all the DNS servers are updating to the new IP range, some of you will be seeing the old servers, while some others will be seeing the new ones. If there was about to be any downtime in the server, it would happen on January 10th, which is a Sunday, most likely nothing will happen.

The way we are going to cope with this is to freeze the forum and playground in the old server from January 10th 00:01 CET. At that time I will switch the DNS records, giving the whole system the Sunday to update. Worst case scenario some of you might not be able of posting anything to the forum or the playground until Monday January 11th. The website will work as normal, the email lists should do as well.

You might ask why we are doing this if it is not strictly needed. Arduino’s web development team is responsible for strategic planning on how to use the web for our project and, after studying the current use of the net and the possible new improvements, we have realized that sooner or later we would have to migrate to a better version of CentOS, which is the OS provided by our server provider. This will allow us creating new services, make better use of our processing power, and optimize our backups.

Talking about something else, there have been many requests for updating the forum. We are all for doing it, but first things first. Directly after fixing the server’s OS we will:

1) upgrade the forum’s software to the latest stable version,

2) make new templates for the forum to make it look like the rest of the website,

3) move the forum’s search function into Google to speed it up,

4) add some fancy web 2.0 functions to the forum like “twitter this” or “send this to my faceboook”