update on bigadv

[kasson]

We wanted to give a quick update on bigadv. No new policies or changes announced here. The purpose of this post is mostly to be a little more transparent about what we've been up to (and why people may have seen changes in bigadv availability).

Briefly, one of the servers ran into a code bug ("feature"), and the fix I hacked for it caused other problems, so one of the bigadv servers has been largely offline. That server was handling a lot of the bigadv-8 traffic, resulting in more limited availability of bigadv-8 work units.

I have personally been busy with other server transitions, particularly moving data and virtual "servers" from Stanford to new machines I have acquired at Virginia. I have a new bigadv server lined up, but we've also had some issues with the physical installation there (the RAID arrays shipped with sub-standard rails, which is annoying). We're hoping to resolve those early in January, and once that server is up and running, I'll start prototyping projects for bigadv-16. More broadly, we're increasing the geographical distribution of FAH servers, which should help a lot with redundancy at the times (fortunately infrequent) when we have large-scale outages at Stanford.

The bottom line is that we haven't been intentionally sunsetting the bigadv-8 projects, but we've had a confluence of bigadv-8 supply and server code issues at the same time that we've been busy with other server transitions. The policy plan remains to bring new bigadv-16 projects online and then sunset bigadv-8 no sooner than Jan 15.