Summary: 

The ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance.  This will result in a short period of downtime for the entire ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Saturday October 17, 2009 03:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Saturday October 17, 2009 07:00 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

During this 4 hour maintenance window there will be a brief period of downtime, estimated to be about 15 minutes, where users will experience trouble accessing the entire ASP.NET website.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated on Saturday, sometime after the maintenance is complete.

Hi Terri,

it's good that you put this here.

there is ONE problem ... if we were not aware you are down, and we come here to look, we then experience a Catch 22.

QUESTION:  why not ensure a "We are down for scheduled maintenance" page?

Thank you.

Regards,
Gerry (Lowry)

Further explaination (in case I was unclear).

By a Catch 22, I mean that instead of seeing a page that states something like:

    asp.net is down for planned maintenance for approximately ________ minutes.

We see a              503 Service not available

Then we have to wonder whether you are doing maintenance or you have crashed or you are under a DDOS attack, et cetera.

By we, I mean people like me who should be asleep and the gazillions of developers on the sunny side of planet earth.

Regards ~~ Gerry

This maintenance completed successfully.

Hello Terri,

I am glad that the maintenance completed successfully.

What do you think about my suggestion, above, regarding ALL maintenance (including unscheduled)?

[Also, would you prefer that I post my suggestion over in Feedback on this website  ???]

Regards,
Gerry (Lowry)

gerrylowry:

What do you think about my suggestion, above, regarding ALL maintenance (including unscheduled)?

What you are asking for would not work well on nights where our web host is doing operating system patches ("patch Tuesday" updates from Microsoft).  There are many interconnected servers responsible for different functionality across all of our web properties (ASP.NET, Silverlight.NET, WindowsClient.NET, IIS.NET).  The overall patching window is broad (4 hours),  and the window for our specific servers was 2 hours.  During that 2 hour window, different portions of the ASP.NET website would be unavailable for about 5 minutes at a time.  So, my options would be to put up a broad "system maintenance" alert and pre-alerts on the site for 2 full hours and take down the site for the full 2 hour patching window...or change that message to be specific to the server and functionality being rebooted throughout the patching window.  The "warning, site functionality XYZ will be going offline in 10 minutes", "warning, site functionality XYZ will be going offline in 5 minutes" count-down notices for all of the different site features for each specific server would IMO be too cumbersome to do, plus would require Neudesic personnel to be working during that maintenance window, coordinating with and interrupting the web host personnel who are responsible for patching hundreds of servers at their data center.  ORCS Web tries to patch and reboot the servers in a logical order to minimize the amount of time the sites are affected.  

We do strive to have friendly error pages while system maintenance for site updates is going on...for scheduled pre-announced server maintenance that means short periods of downtime during our lowest trafficked times on early Saturday morning we have not.

Hi Terri,

thank you for the explanation.

I have a KISS solution that might work:  I simple, single page, never goes down site:

example:     http://www.forums.status.microsoft.con

    Status

         ASP.NET                           Up
         Silverlight.NET                  Up
         WindowsClient.NET         Up
         IIS.ENT                            Up

     Scheduled Maintenance:

          Saturday, ......

a simple bot could toggle the status for        Up/Down

Regards  ~~  Gerry