Recently CAcert has experienced some hardware problems with its signing server. The critical systems admin team has recommended to install new up-to-date hardware, and thanks to a donation from NLUUG (the association of (professional) Open Systems and Open Standards users in the Netherlands) to Oophaga, CAcert’s hardware keeper, a new machine has been made available to CAcert on July 20, 2009.

This opportunity is used by the critical systems administrators to test new technology and software. Thorough testing is performed on the new system before migrating all data from the old signing server to the new server inside the secure data center.

The actual migration will take place on Friday September 11. During the migration, the signing system will be out of operation for a period of period of four to eight hours. This means that CAcert signing service will not be available on Friday September 11 2009 between 14:00 CEST and 22:00 CEST. If all goes well, the service may be restored before 22:00 CEST, but we cannot predict that in advance.

UPDATE: full service was restored at 16:00 CEST, the total service interruption lasted only from 14:30 CEST until 16:00 CEST.