[Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24

[Thomas Morton]

So, just a quick thought for future reference - during maintenance is it
possible in future to update the error message to explain that maintenance
is ongoing?

Seeing as how widely WMF projects are used by a non-technical project the
current MySQL connection error I am seeing on Commons is just going to cause
confusion :) And the standard error page WIkipedia was showing a minute ago
is not particularly helpful/explanatory in this specific situation.

Indeed, given the almost certainty of downtime from this maintenance, would
it not just be best to bite the bullet (in such cases) and take the affected
sites off-line with a useful maintenance message? It's essentially the same
end point.

What's the best way of addressing this suggestion to the right people? (i.e.
the ops team?)

Tom

On 23 May 2011 21:19, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation will be performing network maintenance on
> Tuesday, May 24 between 13:00 and 14:00 (UTC) (see other timezones on
> timeanddate.com: http://ur1.ca/49cl2 ).
>
> During the maintenance period, you may experience intermittent
> connection issues to Wikimedia Foundation websites, including
> wikipedia.org.
>
> We have been experiencing router networking issues (and as a direct
> result, latency issues) since last week. After much investigation, and
> temporary fixes, the Operations team decided to update the router
> software and tune the configuration.
>
> We apologize for the inconvenience.
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
>
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