Dick,
Further to Tom's response, here are a few other points.
In your message, you state: "The scheduled maintenance notification was apparently posted or E-mailed somewhere."
There was plenty of notice of this outage. Barry sent a note to the Board more than a week in
advance (see ARRL-ODV:25355 Network Maintenance Schedule, sent to you and the rest of ODV on Jun 1), It was posted on the ARRL web site news feed, on the LoTW Yahoo group and, on one
or more of the LoTW web pages.
The reason for the "outage" was planned maintenance to the configuration of ARRL's network, for security improvement as well as addressing some issues within ARRL's in-house network. LoTW itself continued to function, but could not be accessed since the network maintenance made LoTW unreachable.
You also asked "Has there ever been consideration of having two computers run LOTW somewhat in parallel," The answer is yes--there is a second instance of LoTW, and it is being used to re-write the database code which runs on the LoTW production server. The old version will be updated to the new one following validation which is ongoing. This has all been communicated before, in LoTW's regular reports to the Board.
The Board approved the LoTW mission statement, which stated clearly that LoTW was not intended to be a 24/7 service. Despite our disclaimer of 24/7 access, below are the latest stats on LoTW availability, for the week ending just before the maintenance. These stats are from a monitoring application run by Dave Bernstein, AA6YQ.
73,
Greg, K0GW
_________________________________________________________________
LoTW Availability
Dave AA6YQ Jun 11 10:30 PM
Target availability: 99%
Actual availability
- for the UTC week ending 2016-06-11 was 100%
- for the 4 UTC weeks ending 2016-06-11 was 99.95%
- for the 13 UTC weeks ending 2016-06-11 was 99.98%
- for the 26 UTC weeks ending 2016-06-11 was 99.76%
- for the 52 UTC weeks ending 2016-06-11 was 99.68%
Outages during the week ending 2016-06-11: none
73,
Dave, AA6YQ