Planed upgrade – broadband. 

Over the next few days we will be installing a new host link for our adsl backhaul. This should not cause any downtime but you may notice a ppp drop as sessions are balanced across the new links. 

This should only cause a few seconds of issues however in some cases it may be that your router needs to be re-booted to reconnect. 

If you have any issues please call support in the normal way. 

Planned maintenance work on one of our transit links 17th Sep 2015

We’ve been advised by Allegro, one of our transit suppliers, of work to be undertaken on one of their core routers in Manchester. This should not mean any loss of service to us or our end-users as we have multiple diverse routes into and out of our data centres — there may be a few moments of route instability during the 45 minute work window until they re-converge and stabilise.

Date of work: 17.09.15
Start time: 00:00 BST
End time: 06:00 BST
Place of work: Manchester
Planned Work: EU3819
Work description: Service migration to a new device

UPS battery work in Huntingdon data centre

One of the smaller UPS units protecting one of the racks here in the data centre is indicating that the bateries need replacing. These are on order and the work will be undertaken shortly. We will advise further when we have a confirmed date & time.

There should be no impact on the rack up-time as the main data-centre UPS will be on-line at all times, but as this rack contains a number of our core switches and there’s always the possibility of an unforseen problem, we consider that this should be noted as “at risk” work.

Planned maintenance work on one of our transit links 2nd Sep 2015

We’ve been advised by Allegro, one of our transit suppliers, of work to be undertaken on some of their core routers. This should not mean any loss of service to us or our end-users as we have multiple diverse routes into and out of our data centres — there may be a few moments of route instability until they re-converge and stabilise.

Date and Time of Maintenance: 02-Sep-2015 23:59:00 GMT to 03-Sep-2015 03:00:00 BST

Impact: Loss of service for up to 15 minutes during the outage window

[COMPLETED] Maintenance work on backup generator 18th August

During a routine test we have discovered a small issue on our generator that, whilst not immediately service impacting, needs attention. Our specialist engineers have assessed the generator and determined that replacement parts are required.

These will be installed on Tuesday 18th August. During the work window (approx. 2 hours) the generator will be shut-down and unable to take the load if there is any mains power issue. We still have our main backup UPS on line as well as smaller ones protecting core network & client areas.

We don’t envisage any downtime or other network/client affecting issues because of this work and this is an advisory only.

[CLOSED] ADSL issues in Suffolk & Essex

We’ve been advised by BT Openreach that since around 9:46Am today, they’ve been experiencing connectivity problems with a number of their ADSL lines especially in these two counties caused by what they believe is a broken/failed back-haul cable. There’s no time to fix given yet.

Service restored: FINAL: The onsite cable repair team completed the activities by 03:55. All Broadband services were prioritised and restored at either 00:15 or 00:30.

[UPDATE] Cable incident has now been raised as the fault has been proved out from both ends (Colchester & Ipswich). Precision testing officers (PTO) are working on localizing the fault which is 4.72km away from Ipswich telephone exchange. A PTO is in the field driving to the location of Bourne Hill which is in the Wherstead area of Ipswich. The fault has yet to be confirmed but on initial findings it looking like a 96 fibre cable that has been affected.

[COMPLETED] Planned maintenance work on transit link 20th August

We’ve been advised by Cogent Network, one of our transit suppliers, of work to be undertaken on some of their core routers. This should not mean any loss of service to us or our end-users as we have multiple diverse routes into and out of our data centres — there may be a few moments of route instability until they re-converge and stabilise.

Date and Time of Maintenance: 20/08/2015 00:00 to 04:00 GMT (01:00 to 05:00 BST)

Impact: Loss of service for up to 15 minutes during the outage window

[Update] URGENT: Leased line outages

 

[Update] 15:45 The engineers have repaired the faults identified and all circuits are up & reporting as being heathy. If anyone is still seeing issues please mail into support@merula.net. We are conducting a postmortem with the supplier to ascertain the root cause, the fix made and to find out why their agreed backup routing didn’t kick in as part of the DR process. We will update the ticket as we know more.

15:10 Multiple back-hauls to us and other customers are affected by this fault; this has been escalated internally by the supplier to their 3rd-level team. No time to fix as yet.

14:26 Engineers have arrived on-site and are starting their investigations.

Engineers are en-route to both ends of this connection.

We are aware of a problem affecting one of our core bearer lines into HEX in London which in turn is affecting a number of customer  leased lines. These are currently hard down.

This is a high-priority outage for us and we are working to get this resolved as quickly as possible and apologise for the down-time being seen. We do not currently have a time to fix but expect a status report within the next 30-45 minutes.

We will post updates here.

Overnight supplier interconnect works; morning of 4th August

Description of Works:

Essential maintenance work is required to protect the performance of Interconnect services. This work will take place during the following window.
Date & Change Window:

4 August 2015 00:00hrs to 4 August 2015 05:00hrs BST

Impact & Outage Duration:

Intermittent during the window 4 August 2015 00:00hrs to 05:00hrs BST
Services Affected: possible transient loss of connectivity on DSL circuits

Virtual Server – failure

One of our Virtual servers currently has a failed RAID. The drive is rebuilding with a replacement drive.

Sites currently hosted on this server are currently unavailable – this includes one of our primary name servers (which should have no affect) and a couple of customer servers along with one of our shared web sites.

We are working to bring this back as soon as possible and will update this as the disk re-build progresses. We believe at this time that no data has been lost

This does not impact any services UNLESS your site was hosted on the affected server.