Moving ahead

Last few months tons of changes have been made to OSgrid. The main change being all grid services, that have been migrated from Texas to new servers in Canada. Dan Banner and Paela Argus took care of the migration project and succeeded without notable "unexpected issues". I call a Great job on that one ! For added functionality and changes in the grid, changes to the INI files have been made. OSgrid issued a new version which includes these changes. The Red Dragon 25 region VAR has been manually updated with the changes, it and is happily running without any complications.

Also huge improvements to it's website have been made. A lot of the old URL's no longer work, so  the Symbaloo page with quicklinks to handy pages has been brought up to date, we're currently updating all our wiki links.Feel free to use the contact form to send broken links, or your feedback if needed.

For those not aware, updating the OSG webpage was a pretty insane task. The old webby was great, but the code below it was very severely outdated. It's not a matter of rewriting a css, and moving some stylesheets around. Much had to be to be manually recoded, to be able to meet current web standards.  Loads of new features are implemented, and overtime the site took more shape. Currently, it runs better than ever. Congrats and chapeau to Paela Argus for doing an awesome job there.

When OSgrid ran a fundraiser event last year, it ended up at almost $3500,- keeping the future of the grid secure for the forseeable future. It proves OSgrid has a very devoted community, and despite being a niche, we are still very alive and viable. I cannot thank you, fellow residents and OSg users enough for your contribution in this. Your financial support helps everyone in this grid, also the people that really can't afford such, or maybe even the one you don't like. You are bigger than that. Hence I'm proud to be part of this grid, and i hope you are / can be too. Your continued support is highly appreciated though.

Above fundraiser has enabled OSgrid to change ISP and upgrade their hardware. More "bang for bucks", and less bucks. All plaza's had already been migrated to a newer server with more bandwith , RAM and CPU power a few weeks back, and the grid servers have followed succesfully last week.

Now most is migrated, only the asset servers still need to be transferred before the operation can be called 'complete'. Above will mean OSG will get some unavoidable and possibly longer downtime, as not everything can be transferred into operations "on the fly".
To the best of my knowledge this is unlikely to occur before Q4 of this year.  Despite that being months away, It is however a good moment to consider refreshing your OAR / IAR files if you haven't done so in a long time.