Portal Upgrade 29-31 May 2009

Portal CMS unavailable for editing from 6pm 29 May to midnight 31 May during security patch upgrade

Portal Upgrade 29-31 May 2009

There will be a security patch upgrade to the Oracle Portal CMS system this coming weekend. This upgrade is to install an essential security patch; users and editors should not see any change in the functionality of the system following the upgrade.

These are the steps that will be followed:

Thurs 28 May 4am

Snapshot taken of production - public pages only - onto a web server (ictdrweb.cc.ic.ac.uk).
This will be a static version of the site and will be the site visible during the upgrade over the weekend. 

Up until 6pm on the 29th editors can continue to log in and make changes to their sites on production but these will not be visible in the snapshot.

Fri 29 May 6pm

www.imperial.ac.uk and sub-URLs redirected to the snapshot for the duration of the upgrade process. This is the version that all users will see while the upgrade happens. This will show the first 3 levels of the websites and thereafter show a message. Links to other applications will work if they are within the first 3 levels but anything requiring activity (i.e. login, forms etc) will not work.

Example of 3 levels

Users can see to

- imperial.ac.uk/business-school/programmes/executive-mba/embabenefits
 but not to
- imperial.ac.uk/business-school/programmes/executive-mba/studyprogramme/ied

If users click on links to lower-level pages, they will get a message saying

"Unfortunately this page is unavailable. We are undertaking essential maintenance on our website and data centre. Please revisit later. We apologise for any inconvenience.".

Google links from search results to lower-level pages will also get this message. If any user tries to go to a password-protected page they too will get this message.

The upgrade will be carried out over this weekend starting at 6pm on Friday 29 May and finishing on Sunday at midnight.

Stuart Croghan and others will check the system following the upgrade - hopefully Sunday afternoon/evening.

If anything goes disastrously wrong, the system and data will be restored from the backup i.e. to the version as at 6pm Friday.

If all is OK, the redirect of www.imperial.ac.uk and sub-URLs will switch back to the production system.

In any case, after the upgrade process has happened, editors should see the content as at 6pm Friday with recent changes they made.

If you notice any issues following the upgrade, please report them to the Service Desk in the usual way. For urgent problems, contact Theresa Nichols or Marion Brady directly.