Hi Everyone,

On Sunday, January 31st, our entire network will be down starting at around 8:00 AM. All of our sites, mail systems, DNS servers - well - everything - will be down for around 24 to 36 hours.

The reason for the down time is that we will be moving our entire network from MAE-West in San Jose to IX2 in Los Angeles. TAGnet/Netaserve is no longer providing co-location options for ministries (they've gone completely virtualized) and so for the past few months we've been searching for a new home.

No mail will be lost, it just will be deferred for that time period.

Thanks so much for your understanding and pray that everything will go as smoothly as possible. This is a big move - lots of little things can compound into much bigger things!

Love to all!

- Marco

Thank you, Marco for all you do....we will all be praying for your safe trip up North and back...especially moi!


Love,


Stacie

we "benefitters" have no clue as to what all you do to get this up and keep it going.

You did it.

Great job, Marco.

Yay! We are back on!


-Stacie

Glad to see you made it, we were praying for you, Marco!

Love, Cherie

good to see you back!

Marco is GOOD! isn't he!

Yay!

Man, do I have a story for you guys...

So, I drive up to San Jose on Saturday and get a hotel that evening so I can get our servers early on Sunday morning (because Tagnet told me they were cutting internet off at 8:00 AM). The plan was that I'd pick them up and be out of there by 10:00 AM and drive home that day and make all the configuration changes that needed to be made to all three of our servers and then deliver them to our new home at IX2 Networks at the Wilshire Building in Los Angeles on Monday morning.

Instead, I get up on Sunday and go over to Market Post Tower in San Jose, use my security keycard (which was still working) to park downstairs and go to sign in at the security desk. They see I'm a "Tagnet" customer (they know I don't work for Tagnet, but that HSdotcom is a customer of Tagnet's) and tell me there is a problem and that Tagnet is on restriction.

And then the painful experience starts... ;-)

I phone Tagnet and tell them what is going on and they tell me there is a dispute over billing between them and Coresite (the people that rent the rack space/cages) and even if there wasn't - they couldn't pay until Monday!!! This took almost four hours just to get to the point where this was explained to me.

So, I tried to sweet talk security and told them that the machines I wanted to pick up weren't Tagnet's but that we just shared space with them. There was no sympathy ;-) The best I got that day was they allowed me to move the servers downstairs into a protected area - they wouldn't let me leave with any of the equipment.

So, I go and get a hotel for another night and get up at 8:00 AM on Monday to go pick up the servers which Tagnet told me would be available because they were going to pay the disputed costs.

Well, Coresite says they won't release the equipment until they have a tracking # for the wire transfer!!!!!!

When do you think THAT happened? 4:00 PM that afternoon. I finally got the equipment into my car and drove (hitting rush hour traffic in San Jose on the way out - LOL!)... Got home at 11:00 PM last night.

Well, still needed to configure lots of stuff for the new network, make DNS changes with our registrar, etc...

I upgraded one of our servers that I had been needing to do for a long time but that was about it for me - I crawled into bed with my wife and said something like "bed - nice - love bed."

Woke up today, spent about 4 hours configuring what I could - some stuff had to wait until I was at IX2... Left Redlands at around 1:00 PM - got to IX2 (never been in Wilshire Building - very nice place) at around 2:00 PM - hauled all the equipment up to the 16th floor, got my security badge/24 hour access thingy - and finished the final configuration changes that needed to be done. Finished around 6:00 PM - but there was no way I was gonna get out of Los Angeles (DOWNTOWN!!!) - it's gridlock there until around 8:00 PM... So, found a cheap dinner place - drank a soda, ate some food that wasn't good for me - and just got home...

The first thing Stacie says to me as I'm walking in the door is, "email isn't working!" ;-)

And then she hugged me :-)

So, gonna work out all the little bugs now and make the changes I probably forgot and hopefully we will have everything running smooth as butter in a few days!

Love to all! And thanks for praying for me... It was fun telling the account manager for HeavenlySanctuary.com over at IX2 what we do and what our ministry stands for... It always causes some good conversation ;-)

Love to all!

- Marco

Ok, fixed a few things that were broken. Video can now be streamed again...

Our video chat system works once more.

Email lists can have mail sent to them.

Marco is going to bed.

End of transmission ;-)

- Marco