Scheduled Network Maintenance :: Aug. 16th

[TCH-Ryan]

We will be conducting scheduled maintenance on our core network hardware on Saturday Aug. 16th at 11PM EST, we do not expect any outages of more than 5-10 minutes and the maintenance window will wrap up at 11:30PM EST.

 

This maintenance is to conduct a fail-over test on our dual fiber circuits to ensure proper fault tolerance and in addition move a small IP Address block assigned to some of our core servers (such as reverse DNS) to a new VLAN device.

 

Further updates will be provided as the maintenance window approaches.

[TCH-Ryan]

We are still on schedule to begin this maintenance in 25 minutes, further updates will be posted as the situation progresses.

[TCH-Ryan]

The maintenance for the VLAN switch went over completely flawless with DNS servers that are mainly on the VLAN in question never experiencing even the slightest of hiccups. The fiber fail over on the other hand identified some issues with our upstream BGP (border gateway protocol) setup that caused the first fail over test to fail and resulted in <2 minutes of down time. Once the issue was identified and corrected on the applicable router, we conducted 3 subsequent fail over tests in which we took down the fiber feeds in random successions making sure traffic continued to flow over the network on the alternate paths as intended - which they did.

 

In summary, this was a very productive maintenance that allowed us to validate our redundant network infrastructure to identify and correct any issues before they impact our network availability in the event of a serious failure. We have enacted a policy of conducting quarterly fail over maintenance windows to continually test our redundancy state to make sure both the router configurations we control and those of our upstream providers still operate together as intended to provide the best fault tolerance possible.

[TCH-Bruce]

Excellent work Ryan!

[boxturt]

Sweet! Thanks guys!