On the evening of Saturday, June 30, we'll be moving all of Fark's equipment to a new colocation provider.

We'll be down for a couple of hours while this happens, starting around 7 pm US/Eastern time, probably between two and four hours... hopefully closer to two. We'll keep a static copy of all the main pages and tabs up on a temporary web server, so you'll still have something to read. Comments, user profiles, link submissions, mobile apps, user profiles, and all of TotalFark will be down during the move though.

All of our numeric IP addresses will change during this move. We'll take the usual steps** to try to ensure your ISP picks up the change as fast as possible. Worst case, you might have to reboot your computer once after we move. We'll have directions up (at the old IP address) explaining what to do at that point, so no worries.

Last time we did this, in October 2006, we were moving the servers 500 miles. This time we're moving them about 500 feet, or about one block down the street. So we won't be down anywhere near as long. Still, it takes a while to disassemble a full rack's worth of gear, roll it down the street, and re-bolt it into a new rack, and change all the IP addresses... longer if it decides to rain that night.

We're also going to try to webcast the carnage, and the before & after drinking, on this Ustream channel, because, hey, why the hell not, it might be funny... assuming we can get it working over 3G/LTE... More details will be posted here, on our outage page, and on the main site if necessary...


** the usual steps = dropping DNS TTL's down and changing root nameserver glue records a full week in advance

Some new complications w/ getting out of the old building may mean this takes a few hours longer than expected, but, hopefully not. :)

Yes, there are very good reasons for not "just putting it in the cloud". Read the entire thread before suggesting it. :)