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.
Jul 17, 2011 | Outages, Unplanned downtime
UPDATED:
Connectivity and routing problems occurred yesterday and today which limited connectivity (depending on a couple of strange routing problems inside the both the BT and Level3 networks) for a handful of our customers only. All our testing today seems to show this as cleared now. If you’re still aware of problems, please first switch off your router, wait 30 minutes and restart it. If after this you still need assistance, please email support@merula.net
We are in the process of re-routing around the Level3 network.
We’re aware of a few reports of connectivity issues, either failed name resolution or ADSL connection failures. We’re currently unaware of the reason but will update here as soon as we know more. Apologies for this.
Jul 5, 2011 | Outages, Update
UPDATE: This appears to have been an issue inside BT which has now been cleared by them.
We are seeing a few reports of users unable to login or authenticate ADSL sessions. We can see no problems here at the moment but are investigating further. If you are having problems, please email support@merula.net or call into the support line.
Jul 4, 2011 | Outages, Unplanned downtime
A core internal Cisco switch just died. We are waiting for the replacement to “learn” the current network and this should be in place within approx. 20 mins. Currently, this means that following servers are inaccessible and next to them is the effect this may have. Please email support@merula.net if you have any questions.
Radius authentication: Possible slow logins on ADSL
DNS backup server: Should have very little effect
One backup mail server Possible slight delays in mail being delivered.
One shared web server The sites hosted on here will be down
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 16, 2011 | Update
As many of you know, this site is currently the main route for notifications of outages or issues (whether planned or not).
This won’t change but we are now making a number of additional improvements to ensure that updates are available as soon as possible and, importantly, are available at all times.
The first stage in this work is to re-locate the noc server to a dual-homed location in Manchester so that (nuclear attack aside) this will be immune to any issues affecting Huntingdon and Merula and will ensure people can receive updates even if the data centre itself is unavailable for whatever reason.
We know that last night the noc server was down for a while during the outage, which, whilst planned for and announced, is less than ideal. In future, this won’t be the case.
We’ll also be changing slightly the layout, removing obsolete links and making the site easier & quicker to navigate.
There’s a very useful option available on the noc site to sign-up for an RSS feed or (shortly) an email notification which will mirror our postings here and we strongly suggest that all of our customers take advantage of this facility.
We’ll also be adding a feed from BT of their notifications to us of work & outages which will be displayed there, which will allow customers to check if this is a local, major BT or Merula related issue. This is currently available here but soon will be part of a “dashboard” of notifications on the main page.
We’ve setup a Twitter account to be fed by (or feed to) the noc site, so you can follow that account as well http://twitter.com/MerulaSupport.
We’ll also be continuing to update the telephone support number status message which should be used as the primary support route.
As a reminder to everybody, the normal support number is 0845 330 0666.
Finally, we’ve today setup a second, fallback support number which rings directly at our support centre, to be used in the event that the phone system here (and support number which routes from here) is unavailable for whatever reason. Please take a note of this new number: 0844 2011771
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.
Apr 24, 2011 | Outages
Due to a hardware fault on a single server which was temporarily hosting a number of internal systems, some users may have seen an issue on Saturday night.
Systems affected were RADIUS authentication for ADSL (users who were connected were fine, though those that had to reconnect would have had problems), one of our DNS Servers and the Merula webite and portal, since these were all being hosted as virtual servers on the same physical box until the new hardware for each of these, which we were in the process of installing that day, went live.
The cause turned out to be two faulty Hard Drives and appears to be due to a bad batch of drives. Service was restored to some degree by about 2pm and after that we moved the services and servers, one at a time to their new hardware. We believe that all services are now running fully but if you are seeing any remaining issues please call or email support in the normal way.
Apr 7, 2011 | Outages
Last night the mains power failed to the building and kept tripping in and out. The UPS immediately took over and the generator kicked in as planned. Because of the up and down nature of the electrical supply we left the building running on generator until we were happy that the supply company had resolved the power problem which took a number of hours.
Unfortunately, over the last week or so we’ve had approx. 6 similar (albeit lesser) power feed issues and that’s apparently drained the UPS batteries. The engineer attended this morning and advised us that the expected life would be 8-10 years. However, we are now advised after diagnostic tests, that most of the 60-odd cells need replacing now (after only 2-3 years usage). This we’re arranging over the course of the next few days.
The effect of these problems last night was that connectivity with a few servers was lost and not restored until this morning but these we found to be internal issues with dirty file systems not allowing booting and other services on client servers failing to re-start correctly. As far as we can see, apart from the building UPS batteries reaching “end of life” far earlier than we expected, all our systems reacted correctly.
