H-Sphere Upgrade to 2.5 Patch 8 on Feb. 5th 2007

[admin]

On Sunday February 4th during the hours of approximately 1:00PM - 11:00pm ET we will begin running check disk on all the Windows servers to be sure they are ready for the upgrade and that the drive(s) are 100% for this upgradeable. There will be sporadic reboots of the servers will this process is taking place so please warn your customers that they may experience downtime during this process. We will send out of a list of the affected servers in a separate email.

On February 5th at 11:00PM ET we will begin to upgrade H-Sphere from its current version. This upgrade will more than likely take at least 8 hours; however that is an estimate and it may very well take longer due to the magnitude of this upgrade. There will be sporadic reboots of all Windows servers so the upgrade(s) can take affect. Please warn your customers that they may experience downtime during this upgrade and to allow for a minimum of 8 hours for the upgrade to complete.

Questions and Answers:

Q: Why is this upgrade being done during the week and not weekend?

A: Psoft support only works during the week, therefore the upgrade will be done while they are available to assist us if any bugs do arise during the upgrade.

Q: Why at night for Eastern Time?

A: The upgrade takes a minimum of 8 hours to complete. By this time Psoft support is online to assist us. Also, overnight hours are our slowest time for tickets and we will be able to give our full attention to the upgrade.

Q: Will ASP.net 2.0 be supported?

A: Yes, asp.net will be available on all new servers installed; we plan to install a new Windows server within 7 days of completion of the upgrade. Current customers can asked to be moved to this server and new customers can ask to also be put on this system. It will be off for new signups at first but any can be moved to this if they plan to use .net 2.0.

Q: Will Front Page still be supported even though it has reached EOL ( End of Life ) by Microsoft?

A: Yes, it's still supported in H-Sphere 2.5 and we will keep supporting it for all customers at this time. However, we will be setting a date within the coming year to phase out support for FrontPage to only current customers and then to be removed from all systems by 2008. This is due to the fact there will be no more FrontPage fixes, support or upgrades from Microsoft.

Q: Will SPF be supported?

A: Hsphere 2.5 does support SPF, however at this time we have not had time to fully test it in Hsphere 2.5 on a live system.

Q: Where can I see a list of new stuff and bug fixes?

A: You can view all of this at: http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation....php?v=all&p=r

We will do everything we can to make this upgrade as smooth possible. We appreciate your patience and cooperation during this process. If you have any questions please post them here or in a ticket, we will try and answer them the best we can at this time.



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I have edited this post to include the 2nd email about the check disk that must be done on the servers and here is that email with all info:

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Saturday February 3rd at 11am ET we will begin running check disk on 17 servers. This process will take 2 days, so please advise your customers now that this maintenance is scheduled. This process **will** take down sites for the duration of time that it takes for check disk to run on the affected servers.
Each server will take approximately 3 hours and we will be doing 3 servers, approximately every 3 hours during the hours of 11am & 11pm ET on Saturday, February 3rd and Sunday, February 4th.
Below you will find a list of the affected servers and the order in which they will be attended to:
Saturday, February 3rd
NT6, NT16, NT18: 11am - 3pm ET
NT19, NT20, NT22: 3pm – 6pm ET
NT23, NT27, NT42: 6pm – 9pm ET
Sunday February 4th
NT46, NT48, NT50: 11am – 3pm ET
CF3, NT10, NT21: 3pm – 6pm ET
NT29, NT36: 6pm – 9pm ET

**All times are approximate. While we are estimating check disk to complete in 3 hours, it may take longer on some servers.
**We will not be issuing downtime credits for any sites that experience downtime because they are located on the affected servers.

We appreciate your patience and cooperation.

[DVHost]

WOW! Thank you so much for the news. It's very welcome and I will definitely notify my customers.

Quick question... what is involved with moving a customer to an ASP.NET server? I know I have at least one that is desparate for .NET.

[Marco]

That is great news and I sure hope everything will go smoothly.

I would like to ask, are there any plans in the future to include Windows Media Streaming in the Reseller's Plan, I really am interested in it.

Thank you.

Peace in Christ
Marco Napoli
http://www.ourlovingmother.org

[admin]

Originally Posted by DVHost

WOW! Thank you so much for the news. It's very welcome and I will definitely notify my customers.
Quick question... what is involved with moving a customer to an ASP.NET server? I know I have at least one that is desparate for .NET.

It just like moving a user to any other system, it takes about 10 min, and there should be no down time for current customers as it keeps both sites up during the move. Then it goes back and deletes the user.

We talked about doing something like CF but I think that would make a mess in the long run, so we can up with just put 2.0 on all the new servers and make it the default and we can move customers around if they want 1.1 or 2.0 and will not cause as big of mess when we jump to .net 3.0 once psoft supports it.

[Dabelo]

Originally Posted by admin

It just like moving a user to any other system, it takes about 10 min, and there should be no down time for current customers as it keeps both sites up during the move. Then it goes back and deletes the user.

We talked about doing something like CF but I think that would make a mess in the long run, so we can up with just put 2.0 on all the new servers and make it the default and we can move customers around if they want 1.1 or 2.0 and will not cause as big of mess when we jump to .net 3.0 once psoft supports it.

Brad -
My understanding is that the the psoft 2.5 control panel doesn't include setting Net1.1 / Net2.0 versioning ( although 2.51/3.0 ) does.

The given assumption is that under the 2.5 version one would have to
submit a ticket to upgrade a site. to net 2.0 -

So --
For existing Net1.1 sites on existing servers that we wish to upgrade
to Net 2.0, there is a procedure problem in moving the site to a new
server that supports Net2.0, unless

1. The site build and compiled as a net1.1 site will run under net2.0
without recompiling as it is moved ??

or

2. The site is transfer to the new server as a net1.1 site in the configuration
and AFTER the site is moved and running, allow the owner to re-upload
a Net2.0 configured, compiled, and tested version of the site, at the
same time submitting a ticket to reconfig IIS for that site to net2.0.


Has this been condered in the plan or Am I missing something ??
Anyone can weigh in on this --


_Dabelo

[bcswebstudio]

Will this effect any 100% *nix plans?

[Vidvandre]

Originally Posted by admin

Q: Where can I see a list of new stuff and bug fixes?
A: You can view all of this at: http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation....php?v=all&p=r

I forget things... What version is currently running on the Vortech servers?

System packages updated within H-Sphere 2.5 Patch 8 mentions PostgreSQL 7.4.14; Is this included in the update? On a side note; This isn't even the latest release in the 7.4 branch, 7.4.15 (released 2007-01-08) contains several bug-fixes...

Originally Posted by admin

On February 5th at 11:00PM ET

I'm still not totally friendly with the US time zones etc, have no idea what the "ET" notation means; Can somebody tell med if this fixed clock is the correct time for the updates...

Originally Posted by Vidvandre

I forget things... What version is currently running on the Vortech servers?

2.4.3

Originally Posted by Vidvandre

I'm still not totally friendly with the US time zones etc, have no idea what the "ET" notation means; Can somebody tell med if this fixed clock is the correct time for the updates...

Yes it is. EST is GMT - 5:00

[admin]

Originally Posted by Vidvandre

I forget things... What version is currently running on the Vortech servers?
System packages updated within H-Sphere 2.5 Patch 8 mentions PostgreSQL 7.4.14; Is this included in the update? On a side note; This isn't even the latest release in the 7.4 branch, 7.4.15 (released 2007-01-08) contains several bug-fixes...
I'm still not totally friendly with the US time zones etc, have no idea what the "ET" notation means; Can somebody tell med if this fixed clock is the correct time for the updates...

We run what ever is in the H-Sphere package some things we run on our own like the *nix web servers and such. So what ever is in the there is what we will be running unless it's something custom and I don't think pgsql is custom on our setup.

[cleonard]

I can't remember . . . will we be getting PHP 5 also at that point. Across the board or on "new" servers.

Thanks so much.

[bcswebstudio]

reboots of all Windows servers

Forgive my ignorance-- will this affect linux accounts at all?

[joshcombs]

Originally Posted by bcswebstudio

Forgive my ignorance-- will this affect linux accounts at all?

it shouldn't because on Linux you can restart services with out restarting the whole box. Unlike Windows that you have to restart for anything to work.

[Vidvandre]

I've been looking through the H-Sphere change logs and found two items that are (to me) especially interesting. First there's the "XML API" then there's "FTP Sub-accounts" for Windows accounts. Will any of these be made available?

[admin]

We might reboot the freeBSD box but in most cases unless something unforeseen comes up they should stay up. But it might be a good to also let them know there could be down time, just in case.

We are looking in to php 5 is there support from H-Sphere yet on this? I might have missed it, I talked to david about it, and he said we might be able to run it side by side with the current setup. But it may be php 5 only on the unix side, at least until we see psoft support it or give the option to switch them. I have not tried running php5 as php4 works great for me, I don't see a huge need for it like asp.net 2 to be honest but I am sure we will get it here soon.

[bcswebstudio]

There are a couple significant differences that come to mind that can really irk and confuse folks to be aware of:
1- register_globals is now off: some older but commonly used opensource software still relies on values passed in via POST/GET as being global variables as-is. This is a big security issue, so this is no longer the behavior by default. Either scripts need to be adapted (best) or the flag can be set on manually; this one would raise errors and break scripts.
2- a warning is now raised when you attempt to use an undeclared variable. It used to be the case that you could say something like if($something)... but now you do if(isset($something) && $something). This just raises warnings.

You can google for more details.

Running php5 alongside php4 would be the nice thing to do, but like you said, probably only a viable option if HSphere lets you choose between the two. A forced switch would certainly require some heads up as well as "what to do to prepare for.." faq's. I'm ready though