Aug 18, 2011 | Outages, Planned Work, Update
[UPDATE] The server move was completed successfully. We believe that all sites are functioning correctly. However, if you think your site has a problem, please email support@merula.net in the normal manner.
[PLANNED WORK] We are seeing a sudden large number of hard drive errors indicating a possible near-term failure on this server which hosts a small number of shared websites. To ensure that this doesn’t cause problems later, we have decided to move this server to a new VM after normal business hours today unless the error rate increases and we need to move more quickly. Down-time of no more than an hour should be expected. We apologise for the short-notice.
Aug 17, 2011 | Planned Work
We have been advised by one of our transit providers that there may be a brief period of instability on some routes between HEX and Manchester early in the morning of 24th August. There should be no loss of service.
Date and Time of Maintenance: 24/08/2011 00:15 – 03:00
Ticket Ref: 120581
Description: Edge-IX Peering LAN Migration
Services Affected: Edge-IX Service
Justification: Expansion of the Edge-IX Peering LAN
Impact: Due to the nature of this work, you may experience a very short disruption in your service during the specified window.
Aug 17, 2011 | Planned Work
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.
Jun 22, 2011 | Outages, Planned Work
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.
Jun 15, 2011 | Planned 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.
Nov 21, 2010 | Outages, Planned Work
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
