UPDATE -- Network change has been rescheduled for Friday night 11pm Pacific time. Please all posts below for more info.


In addition to our regularly scheduled Thursday night server and database maintenance, we will also be making some changes to our network.

As a result of these network improvements Auctiva.com will need to update our DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name Service and is what translates domain names (Auctiva.com) info IP addresses.

How does this affect you? Ideally, it should not affect you at all. We'll be making the change while the Auctiva site is offline for maintenance and thus when we're back online at the end of maintenance, you should be able to view the site as you always do. DNS changes can take some time to get propogated across the entire internet. For most users, you will be updated after we make the change within 10 minutes.

During those 10 minutes, you will not be able to hit the site, view images or go through checkout. This is scheduled to happen around 11pm tonight. After DNS propogates, the Auctiva.com site will still be down for normal maintenance, but images and checkout will be working again.

We have however, made a gateway for checkout users. Users will hit a landing page with a link to continue on to checkout. Thus, your buyers will be able to complete checkout as normal despite our DNS change.

The community boards will stay up the entire time. We suggest that you bookmark the community boards so that if you have problems connecting to the site after maintenance complets, you'll be able to get to the boards and look for help and post any problems you may be having.

Thanks,

Kevin Kinell
VP Engineering

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Auctiva Kevin K.,

If your computer does not seem to be picking up the DNS change on it's own, there are a few things you can try:

1. Clear your browser cache and temporary internet files.

In Internet Explorer go to the Tools -> Internet Options, then click the "Delete Files" and "Delete Cookies" buttons.

In Firefox, go to Tools -> Clear Private Data -> Check Cache and Cookies -> Clear Private Data Now.

Remember to close all browser windows but one while clearing your cache.

2. For windows users, open up a command prompt and run the command:
ipconfig /flushdns

You can open a command prompt from the start menu by selecting the "Run..." menu option and then typing in "cmd".

If we have posted on the boards that the DNS change has been sucessfully made and it's been over an hour and you still are having problems viewing auctiva.com, it's possible your internet service provider (ISP) is not picking up the DNS change. There is nothing else you can do (shy of reporting the issue to your ISP) at this point and you will have to wait for the propogation of DNS to occur. If this happens to you, please post here so we can be aware of the number of users affected.

-Kevin

**** UPDATE ****

The DNS change has been postponed. Because of a delay from our internet service provider, we feel we have not had sufficient time to test the new network infastructure.

I'll be reporting back to this board later this evening, when I have more information.

For now, normal Thursday night maintenance will proceed as it always does, and nothing will change with our network or DNS settings tonight.

-Kevin

UPDATE

Network changes are now scheduled for tonight. I need to check with our sys admin doing the work on the exact time.

UPDATE -- Friday 3pm

Network changes will happen at 11pm Pacific Time.

The main difference between this happening tonight versus last night is that the site will not be down for maintenance. The window of time for the site being down will not be nearly as long as normal maintenance nights. At 11pm we will begin the updates. The site will be down for approximately 30 minutes.

See my above posts for more info on what you can do if after midnight you're still viewing the page that says "Auctiva has changed DNS".

-Kevin

As per the message above, you may have noticed the site down for approximately 20 minutes on Friday night at 11pm. Things tested out pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, we need to do this again on Saturday night to finalize things.

The site will be down again for 20-30 minutes tonight just after 10pm. Please let us know if you experience downtime longer than this.

Thanks,

-Kevin

Everything completed as scheduled tonight. If you're unable to see the site, please see my instructions above. If you're still not able to view the site, please let us know.

Sometimes DNS changes do take time to be picked up across the internet and it will just take some time for you to view everything auctiva.com related as normal.

Our network changes are complete at this point.

-Kevin