There seems to be an issue affecting some routes to the USA premium network, affecting the following servers:
usa1-pn, usa2-pn, usa1-adj, usa2-adj, usa3-adj and usa4-adj
I have a ticket open with the datacentre and will update this post as I get info.
UPDATE: This seems to have been resolved and seems to have been a temporary issue with a supplier outside of the network.
This only seems to be affecting usa1-pn and usa2-pn but I’ve listed this post under other servers that could be affected at all.
There seems to be packet loss on the network, I have an emergency ticket open with the datacentre and hope to get this resolved asap – in fact as I’m writing this things seem to be improving already.
UPDATE (19:35): I can confirm that as I was finishing the post, buffering completely stopped. I’ve also had word from the network admin confirming that they were working on blocking a flood which lasted for about 5-10 minutes.
Just an update.
The issue is still ongoing, the buffering happens for a few minutes a few times a day still – if the datacentre don’t have this fixed within 48 hours then the contract will be cancelled in the next month and customer accounts will be moved to a new facility.
I do apologise to customers affected by this, I do feel your frustration
There have been some issues on the usa prem network lately, until today the engineers there suggested that it was a problem with the servers but I’ve managed to get evidence together that shows that it’s the network.
They are currently working to find the cause of this intermittent buffering that we’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks – it only seems to happen for a few minutes at a time, but I’ve told them how irritating this is for people that use the network for streaming.
I expect this to be resolved soon, and if not then customers will be relocated.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
This will affect uk1-pn, uk1-adj and a very small number of dedicated server customers.
We are going to be performing some maintenance soon, the details are as follows.Maintenance Type: Network Maintenance
Expected effect on your service: No network access
Expected duration: 30 seconds
This will occur between: 23:00 on Tuesday 20th Oct 2009 and 05:00 on Wednesday 21st Oct 2009 (All times are UK)
Area affected: RSH.North from our Maidenhead DatacentreThe nature of the maintenance window is to reconfigure the core routers as a VSS-1440 cluster. This will provide an increase in redundancy for your service and will provide additional capacity in terms of port aggregation and network resilience. The migration has been carefully planned and we are using the multiple uplinks that each rack has to stage the process and minimise the impact to service.
All of the racks in our Spectrum House data centre have two uplinks. During the 30 second window each rack will, in-turn, have one uplink migrated to the chassis that is configured as a cluster. The link connected to the existing configuration will then be shut down.
Once all the racks are connected to the cluster chassis, the secondary chassis will be configured as part of the cluster. At this point the secondary ports will be brought back online and a fully redundant configuration will once again be achieved.The issues previously experienced with the Cisco systems have been completely ironed out and we are confident that this work will be the last major network maintenance for the foreseeable future. We have, however, prepared the process so that a complete rollback is quick and easy to achieve should it be required.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and we would like to reiterate at this time that the patience shown by all clients continues to be much-appreciated. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.
We will be performing maintenance which will put your service in an at risk period. This will last about 60 minutes, and during this time, your service is running at a higher risk of interruption if a failure occurs.
Date: 14 October 2009
Window: 16:00 for 2 Hours
Duration: < 60 minutes
This maintenance is to improve the network and is necessary under our programme for increasing the reliability and redundancy of the network.
This will not have any impact on the service.
We are still experiencing issues on one of our UK networks. This will be affecting uk1-pn (shoutcast) and possibly uk1-adj (autodj). We do apologise for the problems over the last day or two, but the network providers are working very hard to get this resolved, they have been working on it all through the night since about 11pm last night.
I’ll post any updates here.
UPDATE 13:08: I can confirm that the issue is NOT affecting uk1-adj – only uk1-pn and one dedicated server customer who will be contacted shortly.
UPDATE 14:26: Annoyingly, I’ve just found out from a third party source that there will be another 90 minutes of downtime on the whole network, so this will affect uk1-adj as well. It’s not good that they are doing it at this time in the day, but it must have been the only option.
We have just received this message from one of our suppliers. This only affects customers on uk1-pn, uk1-adj and a small number of dedicated server customers.
We need to perform some emergency network as soon as possible. This has been scheduled for tonight, which we appreciate is very short notice. We need to reboot a router to install new software, and this reboot will take up to 45 minutes. We will do everything we can to speed up the process as much as we can and reduce the maintenance time.
Date: 24/09/2009
Window: 23:00 for 2 hours
Duration: < 45 minutes.The maintenance is to perform an emergency upgrade of Cisco software. We are using a Cisco VSS-1440 as part of our network core, and we have been experiencing some reduced performance with it today. There is no cause within our network configuration and set up of this, and it started to have a detrimental effect on some clients today. We escalated this to the Cisco TAC team, who have diagnosed a fault with the software on the router in the form of a memory leak. Cisco has supplied us with a new version of the software for the router which will fix the memory leak and slow performance.
The nature of this problem is that it will escalate as time goes on, which is why we want to apply the fix as soon as core business hours finish today. Please accept our apologies for the short notice, we hope our clients appreciate this problem was out of our control caused by Cisco software, and we are working as best we can to resolve it quickly.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.
UPDATE 01:56: It looks like the network is coming back up now, it took longer than expected so I’ll post any updates in the morning.