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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