Downtime is tentatively scheduled for Mar 22nd (evening) thru Mar 24th (evening). Mar 25th is reserved as possible downtime if there's a problem with the upgrade. The system should be back up by Mar 26th at the latest. Here's some things you should expect from the upgrade:

• User home directories (/home) will be backed up before the upgrade and preserved when the machine comes back up.
• Mail addresses will remain the same. .forward files should work fine. I'm not anticipating any problems with procmail filters, but you may want to disable them during the upgrade and then test them later. If you use a filtering package besides procmail, contact me asap so I can make an effort to keep it installed after the upgrade.
• Web pages will still be served from $HOME/WWW/. Php3 will be supported (*.php3). CGI scripts will be supported, but not from a pub-cgi-bin directory. I haven't quite decided on how cgi will be supported, so details are TBA.
• FTP will be supported, but anonymous ftp access will not be.
• The majority of packages will be re-installed after the upgrade. Packages with known security problems, or that are obsolete will not be.
• The ssh host key of the machine will change. I will make arrangements for the new host key to be posted on a link off of http://vtopus.cs.vt.edu/~dhagan/ for those of you who wish to verify the new key. [Yes, I could preserve the host key, but it would be a pain, so I'm not.]
• Some DNS changes will be made at the time of the upgrade. The old hostnames will no longer be supported (*.acm.stuorg.vt.edu, cray-ymp*). The IP address 128.173.43.251 will not be supported. [These changes shouldn't affect any of you.]
• Some network access controls will be added (firewall & tcp_wrappers). This shouldn't affect anyone's ability to access the machine.
• We are doing a *major* upgrade to the OS, including a change in native binary format (a.out->elf). If you have compiled binaries in your home directory, they should still work, but you should consider recompiling them under the new system after the upgrade.

As with any upgrade, there will undoubtably be some problems I don't foresee and/or avoid. If you have any concerns or difficulties, before or after the upgrade, feel free to contact me at admins@acm.vt.edu, dhagan@acm.vt.edu or dhagan@colltech.com (for urgent messages). In the event of an absolute emergency, you can call me at 540-664-3070 and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Once Mike is enthroned, I'll make sure he sends out some contact info as well.

Cheers,

Daniel Hagan