Library Database Service Status

Upgrades were done and OSP Illumina was back online shortly after 8:30 am.
DHM

Whoever's on desk this Sunday should be aware:

Sunday morning Mar 26 Scholars Portal will be down for hardware upgrades
5AM to 9AM - ScienceServer will not be available
What will be Effected?
Links to the shared OCUL e-journals in your OPACs, E-Resource
databases, or from SFX will not work

5AM to 11AM - Scholars Portal Search / Illumina will not be available
What will be Effected?
None of the CSA or OCUL databases on Scholars Portal Search will be
available during this time period. Also, because the
"resolver.scholarsportal.info" service we use to redirect requests
for CSA databases to the US servers runs on ScienceServer, these
database connections will not be redirected from 5AM to the time when
ScienceServer comes back online at 9AM.

Note that, while automatic "redirects" won't be working, Waterloo users will
be able to click on the "alternate access" links in the ERM databases for
many of the Scholars Portal databases and ejournals.

Douglas Morton
Davis Centre Library, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1
ph: (519)888-4567 x2648
dhmorton@library.uwaterloo.ca

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Darnell
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 2:50 PM
To: scholarsportal
Subject: [scholarsportal] hardware upgrade for Illumina and server outages

The server load on Illumina shows no sign of decreasing. Each week
since the beginning of the year, the number of searches has increased
and the number of databases included in each search has also been
increasing. The server has been running at full utilization for
several hours each day, particularly on Mondays and Tuesdays, with
most of the usage bunched up between the hours of 11am to 4pm on
those two days. This heavy load has resulted not only in slowness
but unreliability in the software, requiring frequent restarts,
emergency management of processes, etc...

We have been extremely reluctant to bring the server down for
upgrades because we know an extended interruption in service at this
time of year would be a disaster for your libraries. However, there
isn't really an option any longer. We've analyzed patterns of usage
and determined that the least activity happens on the server in the
early hours of Sunday morning -- from about 5AM to 10AM. We would
like to bring down Scholars Portal Search during that time with an
extra hour added for insurance -- so from 5AM to 11AM on Sunday
morning, to do this upgrade work. Because Scholars Portal Search
runs on the same physical server as Science Server, we will need also
to bring Science Server down for a shorter period from 5AM to 9AM on
Sunday morning.

In summary, here is the shutdown schedule:

Sunday March 26

5AM to 9AM - ScienceServer will not be available
What will be Effected?
Links to the shared OCUL e-journals in your OPACs, E-Resource
databases, or from SFX will not work

5AM to 11AM - Scholars Portal Search / Illumina will not be available
What will be Effected?
None of the CSA or OCUL databases on Scholars Portal Search will be
available during this time period. Also, because the
"resolver.scholarsportal.info" service we use to redirect requests
for CSA databases to the US servers runs on ScienceServer, these
database connections will not be redirected from 5AM to the time when
ScienceServer comes back online at 9AM.

Please notify staff in your libraries as necessary. Notices will be
posted on the various Scholars Portal services later today to give
your clients a heads up when they are planning their research time.

Apologies for all of this -- all other options were explored but this
was the one with the least overall impact.

Alan

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