Technical bulletin: SCA internet name server moving

Submitted by Justin on Wed, 2005-12-07 11:48
The Society for Creative Anachronism is in the process of moving its Internet name server onto a new computer. This procedure, which commenced early this morning, may cause intermittent problems with web and email access to any address containing "sca.org" or its subdomains (e.g., "equestrian.sca.org") during the next few days as the change propagates out across the Internet.

The name server is the device that converts a human-friendly address, such as "www.sca.org", into a purely-numeric address that computers understand and which is used when making the connection. To improve reliability, most organizations (including the SCA) run more than one name server, so that if one fails the others will carry the workload.

During the transition time, the old server continues to be online, so most people should not notice any problems. There may, however, be outages of a brief duration while some parts of the Internet still use the old server, yet other parts have updated to the new server. These problems, while unavoidable and unpredictable, are self-resolving with time. The symptom would be an error message of "host not found" or some similar phrasing.

If you experience problems emailing any "sca.org" address, or reaching the "sca.org" web site (or any subdomains), the first thing to do is simply to wait a while and then try again. Those experiencing persistent problems can send email to sca-dns@4th.com to report the problem. This is a TEMPORARY address, valid only during this transition since it needs to be outside the sca.org domain. Please use this special address only for reporting urgent problems, and note that it will be removed from service in a few days.

We expect the transition to proceed smoothly, but felt that we should be proactive in notifying the populace of the possibility of brief outages. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The transition is being made as a part of a strategic initiative to improve the SCA's Internet services, and as with any new "construction", some disruption is inevitable.

Sincerely,

Scott Courtney
Chief Technical Officer
cto@sca.org

Comments are strongly encouraged and can be sent to:

SCA Inc.
Box 360789
Milpitas, CA 95036

You may also email comments@sca.org.

This announcement is an official informational release by the Society for Creative Anachronism , Inc. Permission is granted to reproduce this announcement in its entirety in newsletters, websites and electronic mailing lists.

One added note...Drachenwald and Atlantia

Submitted by Justin on Wed, 2005-12-07 12:13.
One added note... This is authoritative, because I happen to be the person who wrote that official announcement, but this comment is not itself an official SCA announcement, just added information. There have been some problems with Drachenwald and Atlantia that were caused by the sca.org DNS servers. This change that I made this morning should resolve those problems; that's one of the reasons we accelerated the schedule. Justin (Scott)