april, 2024
About the calendar
Planned work that might cause registry service disturbances or outages will be announced in this calendar. The entries will have the ‘REGISTRYOPS’ category.
Each entry will also have a tag that signals the anticipated severity level of the service disturbances:
- regops_risk: The planned work does not involve the production services directly. But some of the services or components involved are also in use by the production systems, so that human error, software bugs, or hardware bugs may have an adverse effect on the registry services.
- regops_irregularities: Very short outages (a few seconds) or broken connections are expected. This may be du to software updates and program restarts. In general, the services will be available.
- regops_short_downtime: Some or all services will be unavailable for one or more short periods (a few minutes). This might be a result of non-redundant servers or network equipment being rebooted.
- regops_long_downtime: Some or all services will be down for an extended period of time (several hours). Work that shall have this tag include: Planned service relocation to another data center, service shutdown during a lot drawing process, major database changes, and the introduction of new functionality that requires an idle database while data is converted to a new format.
Background
From time to time Norid staff have to perform maintenance work on the registry system. For some types of work service downtime may be required. Norid will try and announce such outages to the registrars ahead of time, as far as possible, so that the registrars can adapt their own work schedule and warn their customers. The work will be announced through the calendar on this page.
Work categories
Security updates
When Norid becomes aware of security vulnerabilities in a software or hardware component that is used by the system, or in its configuration settings, and where the vulnerabilities may cause loss of data or unauthorized modifications, we shall try and remedy the vulnerabilities as soon as possible. Unless the nature of the vulnerabilities demands otherwise, we shall try and announce the work to the registrars ahead of time. This type of work may be done at any time.
Ordinary maintenance
From time to time, Norid’s infrastructure and software require updates.
- Upgrades and bug fixes to the underlying operating system and third party software.
- Upgrades and bug fixes to the registry system software.
- Upgrades and bug fixes to the infrastructure components.
Norid will usually schedule this type of work to our maintenance window. Our maintenance window is Tuesdays 0800-1000 local time. Work where we expect only a few seconds or minutes of service downtime will not be announced further. If the planned work is expected to cause longer downtimes than at most a few minutes, the work will also be announced separately to the registrar mailing list at least one week in advance.
New or changed functionality
The introduction of new or changed functionality to the registry system normally has its own schedule, where registrar involvement during specification and testing is managed separately. If the new functionality can be introduced without significant downtime, the introduction will be made as part of an ordinary maintenance work package.
For major changes where some or all of the services will be unavailable for a long time, we will try and schedule the work outside or normal working hours. The work will be announced to the registrars at least one week in advance.
Relocation of production services
Norid operates two data centres for its registry system. The production services run in only one data centre at a time. In order to ensure that our routines and our equipment work as intended, we shall on a routine basis move the productions services back and forth between the data centres. We intend to do this a few times per year. This operation implies service downtimes of a few hours, and we shall perform this activity outside of normal working hours. The planned time window for this activity is Tuesdays 1600-2000 local time. This will be announced ahead of time to the registrars on the registrar mailing list.