Having your Linux distribution suddenly disappear from the internet would put a strain on anyone. It does happen from time to time, however, something the team at Fedora can testify to. Announcing in advance that your distro will pull a David Copperfield would prove far less stressful, and that's exactly what the good people at openSUSE have done.

According to an openSUSE news post from Novell's Lars Vogdt, planned maintenance at the SUSE Linux office in Nuremberg, Germany will result in interruptions to a number of openSUSE's services. Though it affects only the Maxtorhof building on the Nuremberg campus, the maintenance in question is to the building's transformers, resulting in the entire site losing power for the duration of the work. As a result, all servers at the site, including those hosting openSUSE services, will be taken offline.

Failover servers are in place to handle some opensuse.org services, including:

• download.opensuse.org
• software.opensuse.org
• static.opensuse.org
• build.opensuse.org
• conference.opensuse.org
• shop.opensuse.org

The project's downtime page indicates that the failover servers for each will provide static content during the downtime, with the exception of download.opensuse.org, which bears the note that it "maybe [sic] a bit slower."

The page also notes services that will not have failover servers. They include, among others:

• features.opensuse.org
• lists.opensuse.org
• apparmor.opensuse.org
• crashdb.opensuse.org
• api.opensuse.org
• users.opensuse.org
• community.opensuse.org
• board.opensuse.org
• svn.opensuse.org
• git.opensuse.org

There is a particular note that, due to lists.opensuse.org not having a failover server, all openSUSE mailing lists will be down for the duration of the outage. According to Vogdt, building on build.opensuse.org was to end yesterday, Thursday the 10th, so that the packages on the project's mirrors would be current during the downtime.

While the work itself will take place on Saturday and Sunday, the downtime will begin today, Friday the 11th, at 13:00 UTC (9:00 AM EDT) and is scheduled to end Monday, September 14, at 7:00 UTC (3:00 AM EDT).
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Justin Ryan is the News Editor for Linux Journal.
Look for him in the #linuxjournal IRC channel.