Everyone remembers the night the lights went out in Georgia? … I mean on October 4th and 5th at MCC, right? Well, for most people the memory is probably fading as more important activities approach. For us in Information Technology Services (ITS) however, the day is definitely not forgotten. We are endeavoring to improve the systems students and faculty use and rely on more and more.

You may be asking what does this have to do with me? Well, we are trying to get the word out that we are going to make a regular schedule for server maintenance. After talking with several different groups on campus we have chosen the first Sunday of the month from 6 am to 12 pm. This seems to be the timeframe in which all of the services normally used by students and faculty can be offline and affect the least amount of people.

Now, keep in mind this will be for normal server maintenance such as non-critical patches, adding more memory, etc. If there is a critical patch which needs to be applied we will attempt to wait until the next regularly scheduled maintenance. There will be times, however, when we must apply the patch immediately. In either of these cases we will send an email letting you know what services will be interrupted and for how long.

In a perfect world we would never have downtime for servers, however we all know that is not the case. While this regular maintenance would not have prevented the problems from October, it is our hope that by providing a schedule of regular maintenance we can keep the emergency notifications to a minimum and provide better service for all involved.