Last May, LIS decided to outsource the administration and support of this server to WhatIf Networks, a company based in Westbrook, ME that has years of experience supporting FirstClass servers.  The cut over of services took place just before the beginning of the 2010 BLSE summer sessions.   At the conclusion of the summer classes, we began planning to upgrade the server to a newer version of the software, from version 8.0 to version 9.1. One of the driving factors in this decision was the increasing number of requests of the BreadNet community to access their mail and conferences from smart phones (particularly iPhones) and iPads.  Our upgrade now makes this possible and we have a number of happy smart phone users.

However, to prepare for the upgrade, it was necessary to reconfigure the roughly 1000 user desktops so that the upgraded client view was clean and uncluttered. Caroline Eisner, the director of Breadnet;  Margaret ‘Mugs’ Johnson of WhatIf Networks and Shel Sax worked over the weekend reconfiguring the user desktops in preparation for the upgrade.  The upgrade was effected late Saturday afternoon, November 20^th and the new software installed without incident

After the upgrade, a typical FirstClass client desktop looks like this:

Mon, 2/15/10 (or earlier)
ICU, Cobol, C compilers installed
Production db schema passwords updated
new database created
profile language params set

Wed, 2/17/10
8:30pm — Production no longer available for updates
create clone for reporting (based on Wednesday data)
refresh PreProd db
stop cron jobs

9:30pm

shutdown Prod and PreProd dbs
startup/mount
consistent cold backup
code tree backup

10:30pm
start parallel database extracts

Thu, 2/18/10
12:30am
run NLS semantic script
start parallel database imports
4:30am
import constraints and indexes
8:00am
verify new database
10:00am –> late evening
start software code upgrades
start PreProd db for user access

Fri, 2/19/10
morning –> late evening
continue software code upgrades

Sat, 2/20/10
morning –> afternoon/evening<?>
finish software code upgrades
standalone backup of new database
phone tree to tech & functional leads to begin testing

Monday, 2/22/10
database available for all users