As eXPlained in RFC381, we believe that we can minimize the disruption caused by the release of new IMP software systems by doing them on a regularly scheduled basis. In the past we have reserved the one hour period from 7am until 8am every Tuesday morning for our IMP system scheduled software maintenance period. As the size of the network has grown to about forty IMPs, we find we can no longer complete a system release to all IMPs in the one hour scheduled. Therefore, we are extending our scheduled software maintenance period to two hours from 7am until 9am eastern time every Tuesday morning. The extended period will take effect as of the first Tuesday in February. As we said in RFC381, we will not always use the Tuesday morning period, but we always reserve it. On Tuesday mornings when we _do_ use the scheduled software maintenance period, a type 2 IMP to Host message* will be sent to all Hosts about an hour in advance of the period.
We understand that the software maintenance period cannot continue to grow linearly with the number of IMPs, and we will find a way around this PRoblem before software releases start taking 168 hours a week.
[ This RFCwas put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFCarchives by Alex McKenzie with ] [ support from GTE, formerly BBN Corp. 9/99 ]
