LINGUIST List 14.2803

Thu Oct 16 2003

All: Two important messages from LINGUIST

Editor for this issue: Michael Appleby <michaellinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. linguist, LINGUIST List will be unavailable this weekend
2. linguist, New Sun server arriving soon

Dear Linguists,

We have learnt that LINGUIST List will be unavailable this weekend.
The entire network at Eastern Michigan University, where our servers
are kept, is being upgraded. While this work is being carried out,
unfortunately none of our servers will be online. This means that we
will be unable to send out LINGUIST issues, reply to email, or receive
submissions.

Therefore, if you have something you would like posted urgently,
please submit it as soon as you can by Friday and we will endeavor to
post it before our machines are shut off.

We are extremely grateful to the Universities of Edinburgh, Stockholm,
and T�bingen which all maintain mirrors of the linguistlist.org
website. These mirror websites will still be available when the main
linguistlist.org site is not. On the mirrors, links to web forms and
most search engines will not be operational, but you will still find
back issues, links to other web resources, and a lot of the
information relating to jobs, calls and conferences, and so on.

The URLs for the mirrors are as follows. Please use the one physically
closer to you; it should be faster.

Edinburgh, UK: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/
Stockholm, Sweden: http://linguist-mirror.ling.su.se/
T�bingen, Germany: http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/linguist/

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

 - Helen, Anthony and the LINGUIST List crew

Dear Linguists,

And now, some good news. We are all very pleased and grateful to
announce that Sun Microsystems has awarded us a new Sun Fire server
under their Academic Equipment Grant Program. This machine is going
to replace the one we currently call 'saussure.linguistlist.org',
which runs our Oracle database (with 179 tables and hundreds of
thousands of records) and ColdFusion server software that interacts
with the database and performs the complex language searches. We have
been all too aware of slowdowns and 'timeout' errors as the old
machine struggles with all the demands we put on it. Our site will
fit much more comfortably on the new server, and we hope we will
provide a service that is considerably faster and more reliable.

This is a very big move for us, because it is not just a matter of
copying files. As well as setting up all the systems that are on
saussure.linguistlist.org, we are using this opportunity to upgrade
some of our software and implement a new system for editing messages
before posting. Still, we are planning and testing carefully and hope
that any disruption will be minimal. The server migration is
unrelated to LINGUIST List being down this weekend (see above); it is
just a coincidence that our host institution is upgrading its systems
around the same time we are.

This move has started already and should be completed in the next
couple of weeks. We appreciate your patience during this time, and as
always, we are very grateful for your support.

With best regards,

The LINGUIST List Crew