Scheduled Outage for Some Locations

The Office of Information Technology will be changing the way some sites connect to the Archdiocesan networks.

Summary

Wednesday, 11/01/2017 from 4:30pm – 12:00am some locations will experience interruptions.

What is Happening?

On Wednesday. 11/01/2017 Fourteen (14) locations will have their connectivity to the Archdiocesan network changed. Currently, these locations connect to the network over an Internet connection located in our Lansdale datacenter. These will be moved the North Wales datacenter.

What Should I Expect?

There will be brief interruptions to resources at each of the locations that will be moved. Please refer to the table below to see which locations are affected and what to expect. Not all sites will be down during the outage window. Each site will have a brief outage followed by our testing to ensure the cutover went well. The sites with the most users or traffic will be moved first to minimize the total impact. We have a back out plan for each site individually should we run into any issues.

Technical Details:

Each of the 14 sites listed below connect to the Archdiocesan network using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This allows us to connect to sites over the Internet as if they were directly plugged in to our secure network. Currently these VPNs terminate in our Lansdale firewall. As we are closing this datacenter, all of the VPNs need to be moved to our North Wales firewall. We are also taking this opportunity to strengthen the VPN security profile to modern encryption standards. (We are moving from the NIST 2005 recommendation to the NSA 2017 recommendations.) This is the one of the final steps for our move out of Lansdale. Thank you for all of your patience over the past couple years as we worked on this project.

This table lists the sites to be migrated, the approximate time of migration and what to expect.