On Sunday, October 31st beginning at 22:00 hrs PST we will perform several software updates on spirea.forest.net and butternut.forest.net. We anticipate this outage to last approximately four to six hours on Spirea, and less than 30 minutes on Butternut.

The updates to Spirea include the base operating system and several core components. These are mostly minor code revisions and should not cause any significant impact beyond the maintenance window.

On both Spirea and Butternut, we will also be upgrading PHP from version 5.2.x to version 5.3.0. This is a more significant upgrade. There are a number of important changes in this version of PHP, which are detailed here:

http://php.net/migration53

Please pay particular attention to the "Backward Incompatible Changes" page:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration53.incompatible.php

It would also be wise to check the "Deprecated Features" page:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration53.deprecated.php

Deprecated features will still function, but will be removed in a future release.

If you wrote your PHP code yourself, please verify that it will be compatible with the new 5.3.x release. If you use PHP code written by somebody else, please contact the appropriate support channel for the software and verify that it is compatible with 5.3.x.

We will publish an upgrade schedule for the servers closer to the actual work date.

Thank you for your attention.