Subject: Transitioning the IETF web site and email services

From: IETF Administrative Director <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:16:56 -0500

Subject: Transitioning the IETF web site and email services

As you know the IETF is transitioning Secretariat services from NeuStar
Secretariat Services to Association Management Solutions.  This transition
is scheduled to be completed on 31 January 2008

There are two services remaining to be transitioned, the web
(including the FTP services and tools directories) and email
(including all mailing lists).  These are the two largest and most
important services to the IETF.  The purpose of this message is to
explain what is going to happen over the next three weeks.  There
will be additional messages with announcements of details as the
transition progresses.

We will start the web transition next, then start and complete the
email transition, and then finally finish the web transition on 31
January 2008.

There are three kinds of web sites in the IETF.  There are sites
that are hosted and managed by third parties, for example
datatracker.ietf.org.  There will be no changes to these sites
during this transition.  They will remain 100% operational.

There are a few smaller sites that are independent of the main
www.ietf.org web sites, for example www.iab.com.  We will move
these sites early and as quickly as we can.  They all have static
pages so the process is pretty straightforward.  The community will
be notified about 24 hours in advance of each of these moves.

Finally, there is the main www.ietf.org web site.  For this site we
will take several days to actually execute the transition and get
the site setup at AMS.  Then we will have about 10 days of testing
during which members of the community will be invited to check
out the new location.  This testing is an essential part of the
process.  

The IETF is dependent on its web site.  We want the
actual cut-over on the 31 January to be as seamless as possible. If
you receive an invitation to be a tester we do hope you will
seriously consider participating.  This process will be documented
and announced to the community.  You will have time to prepare for
each step in the process.

Moving the email services is similar insofar as there are several
smaller domains, such as iab.org, as well as the larger ietf.org domain.
We will move these smaller domains as soon aswe get them setup.  This will
allow us to confirm the new email setup with relatively low volume.  The
community will be notifiedabout 24 hours in advance of each of these
moves.

The cut-over of the ietf.org domain will be documented and
announced to the community.  You will have time to prepare for this
move.  Of course the plan is for this transition to occur
seamlessly and transparently.

After each of the transitions is complete, we will ask for the
community's assistance in verifying the material that you rely on
and are familiar with.  If you identify an issue we will want you
to submit an action request to [email-masked].

One final note of explanation.  The transition of the main IETF web
site will not be completely transparent.  As I am sure you can
understand, moving a site as large and complex as the IETF site is
very difficult to do without some visible restrictions.  There are
two things the community will notice during this transition.

First, once the transition starts, we will be putting a hold on almost
all
web sites updates.  This hold will remain in place for about 2
weeks, until 31 January when the web site will be cut-over from NSS
to AMS.  During this hold period the site will be transitioned and
thoroughly tested.

This hold will *NOT* affect data driven web pages.  Most of these
are third party sites, for example, datatracker.ietf.org, and so
are not affected regardless.  The hold only applies to static web
pages within the www.ietf.org web site and its various aliases.

During the hold NSS will continue to log all requests for web site
changes.  You will receive a tracker ticket when you submit your
request.  However, NSS will keep tickets open and hand them over to
AMS after the transition is complete on 31 January.  We ask for
your patience during the week following the cut-over while AMS
catches up and processes all of the held requests.

Urgency exception: if you have an urgent need for a web site change you
should make that known in your request.  We will handle those on a
case-by-case
basis.

Second, on the day of the cut-over there will be some downtime for
the IETF web site.  We are going to ask for 4 hours of downtime
although we fully expect to be operational much sooner than that,
ideally within an hour.  We will use this time to synchronize the
databases used by the data driven web pages.  NSS will turn off
their web site, the databases will be synchronized (NSS will export
and AMS will import), and then AMS will make the DNS changes
necessary to make their web site the official IETF web site.

That completes the description of what will be happening over the
next three weeks.  There will be additional messages over the
coming weeks announcing specific steps and details in the process.

Thanks.

Ray Pelletier
IETF Administrative Director

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