ByWater's Spring Cleaning 2020

by Mitch Morrison on Apr 8, 2020

At ByWater Solutions we work hard to maintain the strongest and most efficient infrastructure for your library. We have helped our libraries through multiple disasters including, fires, floods, mudslides, hurricanes and now a pandemic. We plan on making our systems even better to handle anything that comes our way in the future to ensure business continuity for all of our library partners.

The time-honored tradition of sweeping, dusting and general spring cleaning has arrived. Things are no different in the IT world. We thought we would share some of the spring cleaning events our systems team is doing this year at ByWater Solutions and what impact it will have on you.

DNS Migration

DNS is the “phone book” of the internet. It maps the name of a website to an IP address for your browser to connect to. We are moving our DNS from our current provider to Amazon’s Route 53 to provide more capacity and redundancy. This will be a seamless transition and have no impact on your Koha installation. This change will occur Friday, April 10, 2020.

Operating System Updates

For some of our partners on older systems, we are upgrading our Debian Linux operating systems to “Stretch.” This will allow us to continue to provide seamless security updates and system enhancements through June 2022. This process is automated and requires a quick reboot of the server to complete. In most cases, these reboots are around 5 minutes to complete. We schedule these reboots to occur outside of your operating hours and make sure you are contacted before these happen.

Database migration

We are moving our database to a larger sized cluster. This will increase the performance of your Koha instance and provide redundancy from potential hardware events. This is the most impactful of our spring cleaning items and will have your koha instance offline for approximately 1 hour. As with operating system updates we make sure you are contacted before this happens and arrange the exact time to be outside your normal operating hours.

As we continue to build upon and improve our infrastructure we will be sure to keep everyone up to date on what is being done and how it will positively impact your library!