A maintenance window has been scheduled tonight on October 17th between 2:00 AM EDT (-0400 GMT) and 2:05 AM EDT. During this time the uplink switch will be powercycled. There have been sporadic issues with abnormally high pings on the uplink port (greater than 100 ms), which we are working on resolving. The window will last no longer than 5 minutes and will briefly affect connectivity to all servers.

10/18 Update: Visited the data center today to further troubleshoot the high latency problems from yesterday.  Traffic was temporarily blocked off for 5 minutes around 4 PM EDT (no exact time is available).  Latency returned to within tolerance levels (10 - 25 ms) after changing out the patch panel plug.

This is a reminder that we will be transitioning the primary Web server to PHP5 on November 1. PHP4 will remain installed on the secondary Web server running on port 9000 through the end of the year. The upgrade should pose no complications for the majority of users, especially those running turnkey applications. PHP4 will reach its end-of-life at the end of this year, which means no further updates will be produced except for major security holes, but even then patches may be slow to be released. If you’re curious as to how your scripts will operate in PHP5, then the easiest method is to either use the .htaccess rewrite rules listed in the linked wiki article or just access http://<domain>:9000/.

If you have any custom PHP5 rewrite rules, then those will be automatically removed on November 1. A backup copy of the .htaccess will be made in the directory called “.htaccess.php5″. I’ll leave this thread open for any comments or concerns about the big switch on November 1. And if you guys are writing custom Facebook applications, then good news: you won’t need to hack their PHP library to bits now to force the removal of :9000.