I was pleased by both of the replies to my recent LOTW posting. Thanks to both Tom Gallagher and Greg Widen. 1) I'm pleased to see attention to the actual cost of the project, and consideration of capability/cost trade-offs. Keep in mind that the success of LOTW is in good measure due to participation by non-ARRL-members. Our members desire "confirmation" of DX contacts, whereas many DX stations don't really care about confirming contacts with large numbers of USA stations. We need to keep participation of desired stations high, regardless of their membership status. 2) There may be some misconception of what I was attempting to convey regarding outages. There is no problem with announcements of future outages. However, most users don't actually remember or record such information. When they go to a web-site, and nothing happens, they simply assume the system is broken. If, when they went to the site, and received a message similar to the one below, I can't imaging they would be at all upset. *The ARRL-XYZ web-site is down for planned system upgrades between 08:00 and 20:00 Eastern Time on June XX, 2016. Upgrades are being made to the configuration of ARRL's network, for security improvement. We request your patience.* 3) I'm pleased to see that development of LOTW is taking place in a professional environment, and among other things, on a parallel system that does not impact the operational system. The downtime measures of LOTW shown are certainly adequate, and the LOTW team should be proud of them. But, they do not show the availability of LOTW to an outside user. Somewhere in the ARRL is someone (I hope), who has responsibility of connecting LOTW to the outside world, and the overall availability is what is of concern to our membership. Possibly messages describing on-going system outages should come from this level of our IT operation, not just the LOTW team. 73, Dick Norton, N6AA On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 8:18 AM, G Widin <gpwidin@comcast.net> wrote:
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
On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 8:15 AM, Gallagher, Tom, NY2RF < tgallagher@arrl.org> wrote:
Dick Thanks for yours. The maintenance was announced in the ARRL letter on the previous Friday. As to maintenance-free operations I imagine that we could achieve it if we were prepared to increase the annual losses sustained by LotW from the present ~$250,000 per annum to higher number. Our upgrade program will cost roughly $150,000 over the next 12-month period. Recall that LotW is a free service offered to everyone including non members. As with all ARRL service offerings your staff is looking carefully at each with a view to changing the business model with and without membership requirements. LotW is like National Public Radio: you can listen but you don't have to contribute.
Guidance from you on these points is most welcome by me.
73 Tom
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 17, 2016, at 1:42 AM, Norton, Richard, N6AA < richardjnorton@gmail.com> wrote:
Not sure if this should go through the LOTW Committee or just Newington staff, but assume it will reach an appropriate person --
I recently responded to a member complaint about LOTW not working last Sunday. I learned from a post by Bob Vallio that LOTW was apparently down for scheduled maintenance, and included this information in my response. The scheduled maintenance notification was apparently posted or E-mailed somewhere.
If users knew that the system was down for scheduled maintenance, I suspect they would be less likely to complain.
1) I don't know what users see on their computer screens during these down periods, but suggest that somehow they be alerted to what is happening as they attempt to access LOTW, instead of expecting them to search the ARRL web-site or be subscribed to alert E-mails to find notices.
------- Also, sites like Google seem never to be down for scheduled maintenance. I am not certain of the actual computer configuration used for LOTW, nor am I knowledgeable about exactly what was being maintained, hardware, software, or both. LOTW was scheduled to be down for 12 hours, and consequently assume software was changed and tested.
Has there ever been consideration of having two computers run LOTW somewhat in parallel, so that if something is being maintained on one, the other just keeps running, and at least stores new user input data so that when the other comes back up, it will update properly? The price of quite powerful computers and even terabyte drives is reasonably inexpensive. There would be some cost to configure and program this.
2) Is it reasonable to provide no-scheduled-maintenance-downtime capability?
73,
Dick Norton, N6AA
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