We are undertaking some remedial work on the electrical supply to a client cabinet that involves access to the main electrical supply board for the server room. We don’t envisage this causing any problems and are posting this as informative only.
The below work is now complete. There was a short outage in both SOV and HEX we believe all servers are now working as they are. If you have any issues please contact support.
We are planning on some preventative maintenance work to be undertaken on various items of equipment in our suites at Harbour Exchange Square (HEX) and Sovereign House (SOV) in London.
The works planned are as follows.
At SOV:
(1) Install new UPS batteries as the existing ones are reaching the end of their planned life. This operation is designed to be performed whilst the UPS is running. It should not therefore affect the electrical supply to this cabinet. However, we have a second, spare, tested UPS on-site in case anything does break on the first one and we then lose power.
Services or items that could be affected, if this UPS work fails and we have to fall-back to the spare, lasting for a period of no more than 30 minutes are:
– RADIUS authentication – we have a backup server running in another location, so ADSL users who are not connected before and actually try and connect at this time may find that authentication takes a few seconds longer. No existing connections should be lost or dropped.
– One backup name server will drop off the Merula network; there are 3 others in separate locations. There should be no effect on any clients or other services.
– One server running shared web-sites. All clients on this server who might therefore be affected have already been advised of the work planned.
– One co-lo server. This client has also been advised.
– Merula web-sites: the NOC server, portal server and mymerula sites would all be off-line for this period. The new off-site NOC box mentioned before isn’t due now to go live until early next week as the other ISP is undertaking planned works and can’t go live until then.
(2) Swap out an internal firewall. This will be done at the same time as the above work. The only sites affected will be internal Merula servers. No customer boxes or services are behind this firewall.
(3) Un-rack a couple of obsolete servers. None of these are currently live. No effect on anybody inside or outside the Merula network.
At HEX:
(1) Install a new backup router. No effect on any services or customers. It will be enabled at some future point which we’ll advise in advance.
(2) Replace cabinet UPS batteries and install a new monitoring NIC. Again, this is a hot-swap operation. The UPS should not go down. If problems do arise, again we have a spare, tested UPS on-site and maximum down-time for the services below will be 30 minutes.
– Internal monitoring server and fax server. No external effects.
– Two co-located client servers. These clients have already been advised of this possible down-time.
– One core switch – if power is lost, there will be a small amount of packet loss for 5-10 seconds as the ring stabilises. There is no direct affect on ADSL and connectivity services although there may be a few brief periods where access and traffic may be intermittent as switches & routers pickup new routing due to the work.
If you have not received an email from us, then you should expect to see nothing more, at the worst, than a little bit of instability on your ADSL connection for a period of no more than 30 minutes.
Please do email support@merula.net if you have any concerns or issues about the scope of this work.
At 11pm tonight, we intend making a small config change to the UPS system acting as the backup for one of our more important racks here in Huntingdon. Whilst moving this from bypass should not affect the rack in anyway, we are however advising customers that there may be a window of downtime of a maximum of 30 minutes if this fails to switchover correctly or causes other cascading issues.
Services that could be affected:
Merula website & associated sites.
A small number of servers hosted in Huntingdon.
To make sure that this is the maximum downtime, we have current backups of the configs of the core routers here as well as suitably specified and tested fall-over units available to use should any of the live ones fail to come back up for any reason. Again, we have no reason to expect this to be a problem but want to ensure that worst case is prepared for.
BT are working at the exchange that our ADSL central pipe connects to overnight tonight. This is a major upgrade. While we do not have too many details at this point there is a posibility that there may be an outage on our ADSL network between midnight and 6am tomorrow.
This will not affect any of our LLU offerings but may affect any or all of our BT ADSL offerings
After a long wait we are pleased to announce that our new 1G link to BT for ADSL is now live. This means we can now offer ADSL2+, FTTC anf FTTP products as well as standard ADSL1 based BT products.
As the final part of the installation we will be moving our existing users to the new infrastructure tomorrow at some point after 2pm.
This should not have any impact on your service other than a single reset when your connection will drop from the old service and reconnect to the new link.
We will be announcing a range of new peoducts very shortly
Some users may have spotted issues reaching some of our services and with some of our ADSL connections between 0:30 and 1am. It appears that due to an error by a third party a a network loop was created causing some routing to get a little confused.
The issue seemed to have righted itself while we were investigating. We are reasonably confident that all services and servers are now fully working but we are investigating the root cause here to try and protect ourself against a reoccurred