asterisk users - May 2013 - Changes to the community service maintenance notifications

You may have noticed (or maybe not) that there have been several
maintenance notifications for the asterisk.org community services this
month. We are working hard to keep up the services running smoothly,
and those notices are sent whenever we think our maintenance may
interfere with the operation of any of the services.

So far, it's been our policy that we send out a maintenance
notification whenever we do anything other than the most minor
maintenance on the services. You can usually read "may have
intermittent availability" as "it should be available unless things go
horribly wrong".

We now realize that most of these notifications are just spam for most
of the community. It is also cumbersome for us to send out the
notifications every time we touch the services. Especially considering
that the services are typically unavailable for at most a few minutes,
if at all.

In an effort to reduce spam and make service availability more
predictable, we're changing the policy about when we send
notifications about community service availability.

Starting on Monday, May 27th, we will have a regular maintenance
window every Monday for one hour starting at 9:00 PM Central Time
(that's 02:00 UTC during daylight saving time in the summer, and 03:00
UTC during standard time). We will try to restrict the service
impacting maintenance to that weekly window.

For the times where there might be a service interruption outside of
that window (either when it needs to be coordinated with our colo
provider, or if the maintenance will take longer than one hour), we
will send notice of the impending service interruption to just the
asterisk-announce mailing list[1].

This will help us in planning service upgrades and maintenance, and
reduce the amount of unnecessary email for the community.

 [1]: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-announce

 -- Digium's Asterisk Development Team