Good morning everybody This is just a quick notification to let you know that, during the course of this morning, (UTC), I plan to deploy a server systems upgrade on the front-end systey which currently stands between our private mail server and the rest of the world. Actually, in fact, I plan to deploy this upgrade on all of the three servers which are installed here. But the two internal servers will not have any impact on the mail traffic flowing between us all.
In point of fact, I have some big plans for the first few days of 2017 in that respect. The first of which is the installation of what is known as "Fail-Over" technologies. That being a system which is designed to monitor the performance and availability of various types of network and Internet services, such as DNS, (Domain System Setting), FTP, (File Transfer Protocol), IMAP, (Internet Mail Access Protocol), POP3, (Post Office Protocol), SMTM, (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) mail, WWW, (World Wide Web) protocol, people many more besides. My aim is to replicate servers on the network so that, in the event that one server should go down for any reason, the "Failover) service kiks in and redirects traffic by modifying the configuration of a domain in DNS, (the telephone directory-like system on which the TCP/IP protocols are basthe). Whilst the outage continues, the server replica performs the functionality of the main stream server. When the outage ends, and the "Failover" system is once again seeing the presence of the primary system, it reverts the DNS settings to their former status, and normal services resume. Because the replication is both internal and automated, the outside world doesn't really know that it's even happened at all, unless by some random chance an external service happens to be using the service which crashes at the precise instant that the crash occurrs. In which case, the connection will be lost and in most cases the external service will simper re-check DNS and be directed to the temporary service instead. thereby no outage issues occur at all. Actually, I have been planning to do this since around this time last year but, owing to the horrendous year which 2016 has been for me and mine, it just never got done. It is somewhat ironic that Lynne's last major purchase on our joint behalf was a Mac Pro 8-processor machine, which means it's quite a beast! But it's stood more or less idle since she went, as I just haven't been able to summon up the enthusiasm to do anything with it. But now, I think the time has come that I should. Quite apart from which, I need to reactivate some of our hosting services which died just before she did, and which I never got around to either explaining to some, or to reviving. But I was looking at that machine earlier on today, and decided that the time has now arrived to set it all up. Quite apart from the hosting servies. I also now think that it is time for me to once again extend the hand of help to those vision-impaired people who believe that them may benefit from these services. Most particularly, I'm thinking of mail and web-based services. But that's for the coming days. In the shorter term, (as in today), please don't worry if, at the time for the brief outage, you attempt to send mail and it bounces. Some mail servers on the Internet do not bother checking backup services, they just return the mail as undeliverable. The (tage for the mail service upgrade won't last more than 10 minutes at the very very worst. It is usually just a matter of issuing a few simple LINUX commands and then sitting back and waiting for the system to do its work. I will post again to the group when the upgrade has been completed. Thank you for your understanding. ============================== My Compliments And Kindest Regards Gordon Smith 'Accessibility And Information Technology Support Specialist ------------------------------
