The 3.0 version of Proofpoint's Protection Server has been out since November, so I finally got around to getting out appliances upgraded last night. The new version gives us increased through-put, support for SNMP, ability to throttle hosts that constantly send SPAM, and some significant compliance features that we may never use.

George from support contacted me about 2:30 PM yesterday and we decided to start the upgrade about 4:30 PM EDT. Since they are on the west coast, it was only 1:30 PM his time, which gave him enough time to get it done in case there were any issues. Since we have 2 Proofpoint appliances, we were able to upgrade them individually without any interruption in mail delivery and without the user community even knowing that anything was going on. The upgrade started on time and took about an hour. The only problem George ran into was when we tried to link the 2 appliances back together. But after talking it through with the developers, they found the problem to be a Linux rights issue in a certain directory that got changed during the upgrade.

Outside of the Domino environment, I have not had a production product that upgraded this easy in a long time. And the best part was that I didn't have to do a darn thing other than ask for the upgrade! Kudos to the boys and girls at Proofpoint.