Subject: Downtime for all Splice machines, Saturday 23 April @ 1600 BST

Hi everyone,

As scheduled, we're planning to upgrade tape (the actual physical server
which hosts all our machines) to Debian Squeeze this Saturday.

We aim to start work at 4pm, and if all goes well, be finished by 6pm.
During this window, all machines will be down.

We will post status updates on IRC (#masterplan on irc.oxirc.org) as we
work.

If the upgrade goes to plan, we will upgrade rope (the shared service VM)
immediately afterwards. This will involve brief downtime for a reboot.

We aim to keep the downtime window small enough that any e-mail sent to
our domains during it will be re-tried and delivered after the system is
back up.

Owing to various changes in Grub 2 and Xen 4.0, some VMs may need their
configuration files altering in order to boot after the upgrade.

* Please let us know *:

  * Are you happy for us to mount the disk of your VM and edit the necessary
    configuration files, or would you rather be told what to do yourself
    beforehand? We believe the edits will be confined to /boot/grub/menu.lst,
    /etc/fstab and /etc/inittab

  * If you are happy for us to do the above, would you like a diff of any
    changes made e-mailed to you??

  * If there are any other issues with your machine booting, how would you 
    like us to proceed?

Let us know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
David & Michael