Technology Advisory Group

Update 2/8: This server move has been postponed until next Thursday, 2/16/12.

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Connie Wisdo in ITDA sent out this notice about the University’s public web server. I don’t think this change will have any effect on faculty, but please let TAG know if you have any concerns.

Connie’s announcement:

I wanted to give you advance notice of a server replacement taking place next week.  The University’s public web server, known as matrix.scranton.edu will be replaced by a new server, which will be known as www.scranton.edu.  No interruption in service for the University’s web site is expected as a result of this action.

The Public Relations office has been working closely with the PIR division over the past several months to plan this transition.  We have collectively reached out to a number of departments as we were doing this planning, to help ensure that only current web content gets moved over to the new server.

A separate notice will be posted on the my.scranton portal, to inform the University community of the action.  However, since no downtime is planned, the action will likely not be noticed by anyone.

CMS users will be notified separately of some minor changes that will occur in the CMS after the move.

The matrix server is old and outdated, and needs to be replaced.  The naming of the new server as ‘www’ will eliminate the need for many of the redirects that are currently in place (e.g.www.scranton.edu/admissions will no longer need to redirect the user tomatrix.scranton.edu/admissions).

Testing of the cutover (using a test server) is taking place on Monday (the 6^th) and if any identified problems cannot be rectified before Wednesday (the 8^th), the action involving the production servers will be delayed accordingly.

I asked about existing links to matrix.scranton.edu URLs.  They’ll still work:

The Systems group will set up the configuration of the new server so that it responds to eithermatrix.scranton.edu or www.scranton.edu, so it will work immediately after the move.

Further, we are going to republish the entire site in the CMS to www, so any links that were established in the CMS as “internal” links, will change automatically to www upon the republishing.  However, I would advise that you do change any hard coded links shortly thereafter, just so we can try to eliminate the term “matrix” from our web vocabulary!