EDIT: 4:50PM Scrapbook (aka pics.livejournal.com) is back up! Thank you.

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Sorry guys for the late notice! We've had to bring down the ScrapBook databases for some emergency maintenance. This means pics in your LiveJournal gallery are going to be unavailable. They should be back up within the next hour. I'll update this post when they're back online and we've checked them out.

bt

EDIT@6:54PM PST

We just implemented a temporary fix for our internal network and it *looks* promising. We'll let it bake in overnight and see how well it performs tonight and tomorrow.

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Hi hi!

We've completed the majority of the move and had the site back up by 20:00 UTC (hey, look, I can post! You can read! Yay!) , but there's still some lingering issues that we need to clean up and are aware of so please be a little more patient while we wrap up the odds and ends.

I want to echo the lj_releases post where we thank burr86 and dormando for their ceaseless efforts, skill and knowledge. The LJ Ops and Engineering teams have/are *still* working their butts off but without burr86 and dormando's expertise, we could not have pulled this off.

For you techies, the slowness on our website is known, and the issue is currently isolated to oversubscribed ports on our core switches. That's direct from our vendor. Yeah, I know... Anyways, we're trying to implement a temporary workaround and we'll be looking to upgrade our hardware as a permanent solution. Please, hang in there a little longer!

bt

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Welcome to a Very Special Edition of LJ News.

Moving Day and What It Means for You

Moving What Where?

The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We're moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. We don't think the move will take more than four hours, but there's always the possibility that it could take longer (the best laid plans and all).

What Does This Mean for You?

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we're going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

New servers mean new IP addresses, so it's possible that LJ mail might not reach your email inbox because your email provider or client doesn't recognize the new IP addresses. We're working with email providers to whitelist the new IPs. There are a few things you can do on your end:

• Add these two IP addresses to your "allowed senders" list (or whitelist) and address book in your email client: 208.93.0.18 and 208.93.0.50. These are the new IPs for sending comments notifications and LJ mail to your email inbox.


• Add lj_notify@livejournal.com and webmaster@livejournal.com to your email address book.

If you can't edit the spam or junk filters in your email client, you may need to disable them entirely. Make these changes just before 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning or shortly after the site comes back up to ensure that your LJ mail makes it to your inbox.

Those of you who use domain aliasing to forward your domain to your LiveJournal will need to create a CNAME record that maps to livejournal.com. Please note that we're no longer supporting the A record. For more information, check the domain forwarding FAQ.

Before the move, you can check lj_maintenance for complete details about the planned downtime. During the move, you can check status.livejournal.org for updates about the site's status.

Permanent Account Sale Delayed

We regret to inform you that due to the server move, the Permanent Account sale has been pushed back to December 4, rather than November 20 as announced in the last news post. After the virtual dust has settled from the move, we'll be able to turn our attention to the Permanent Account sale. Except for the start date, the details remain the same: You have a limited opportunity to purchase LJ for life for only $175. It's a bummer to delay the sale, but on the bright side, you have more time to save up.

But What About A La Carte Userpics?

We know we promised more information about a la carte userpics, and we're sorry that details have not been forthcoming (blame it on the move). We're still planning on having a la carte userpics, but we don’t have any details yet. When the move is over, we'll have more information. We're sorry for the delay.

We're pulling the plug! And putting it back in a different location! Ok, that was bad.

Seriously though, our data center move -- from San Francisco to Montana -- is scheduled for THIS TUESDAY, November 18, 2008 at 16:00 UTC (this equates to 8AM Pacific timezone) and will last for 4 hours. Unfortunately it'll be total downtime for all our sites and services -- no posting, no reading, no email.

Another news announcement will be posted on Monday November 17, including links to updated FAQs that you'll want to check out before the move.

As always, status.livejournal.org will have any updates during the move so bookmark it and check it out for the latest news.

All of us at LiveJournal have been eagerly looking forward to this move and I want to thank you for your patience and understanding as we put the finishing touches on something that will allow us to bring you an even better product in the future.
Though for us in the Ops and Engineering teams, we'll be REALLY happy if, on Tuesday, everything just works the same way it did on Monday.  Heh.

bt

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