You may have noticed (or maybe not) that there have been several maintenance notifications for the asterisk.org community services this month. We are working hard to keep up the services running smoothly, and those notices are sent whenever we think our maintenance may interfere with the operation of any of the services.

So far, it’s been our policy that we send out a maintenance notification whenever we do anything other than the most minor maintenance on the services. You can usually read “may have intermittent availability” as “it should be available unless things go horribly wrong”.

We now realize that most of these notifications are just spam for most of the community. It is also cumbersome for us to send out the notifications every time we touch the services. Especially considering that the services are typically unavailable for at most a few minutes, if at all.

In an effort to reduce spam and make service availability more predictable, we’re changing the policy about when we send notifications about community service availability.

Starting on Monday, May 27th, we will have a regular maintenance window every Monday for one hour starting at 9:00 PM Central Time (that’s 02:00 UTC during daylight saving time in the summer, and 03:00 UTC during standard time). We will try to restrict the service impacting maintenance to that weekly window.

For the times where there might be a service interruption outside of that window (either when it needs to be coordinated with our colo provider, or if the maintenance will take longer than one hour), we will send notice of the impending service interruption to just the asterisk-announce mailing list[1].

This will help us in planning service upgrades and maintenance, and reduce the amount of unnecessary email for the community.

[1]: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-announce

— Digium’s Asterisk Development Team