Next Downtime 26th October?

[richardmyers]

"We are committed to a programme of improvements to our Internet infrastructure and we are working hard to ensure that service is reliable and efficient. As part of these enhancements, essential maintenance will begin on Sunday 26th October, which means that some customers may notice an interruption to their Internet service at 05:00 for approximately 5 minutes. We apologise for any disruption this may cause."

If the last lot of maintenance is anything to go by we can expect a number of hours without internet access.

[miken]

There probable changing the time on a server, could be hours!

[Halloway]

If the last lot of maintenance is anything to go by we can expect a number of hours without internet access.

If you are referring to the big outage in August (Sat 9th if memory serves), that wasn't caused by maintenance.

[richardmyers]

Ah, maybe I'm going senile then. I thought they'd performed some network 'upgrades' shortly before the August outage.

[Halloway]

There was a rumour to that effect at the time. What I do know about that outage is this:

After the outage I wrote a reasonably excoriating letter to whoever is Sales Director at KC (can't remember the name). I received the usual vanilla response from customer services but was surprised a few weeks ago to be called at home by a Sales Manager from KC who wanted to respond in person.

Being a bit nonplussed by this, I failed to ask any penetrating questions other than to verify whether the outage had been caused by maintenance or other intervention going wrong, as was rumoured at the time. The response to that question was 'no'. I was told that the failure was caused by a spontaneous failure in a core IP router. The subsequent problems were actually caused by the failover not working. This meant (naturally) that KC instantly lost access to most of the resources on the network, including the routers. It also explains the lack of updates on the KC site and elsewhere.

Perhaps worryingly, at the time of the Sales Manager's call they had not discovered the reason for the failure of the failover. (The initial failure of the IP router, whilst unfortunate, is not really cause for concern; the failure of the protection definitely is.)

[richardmyers]

Ah fair enough, and kudos to KC/Karoo for actually speaking to you about it.

Hopefully the planned maintenance will go off without a hitch.

[miken]

Status	Problem - All
Log Date/Time	26-10-2008@08:06:00
Estimated Time	2 h
Time Remaining	0d, 0h, 17m, 53s
Description	26-10-2008 08:06:53 - Some customers may be experiencing a problem when trying to connect to the internet. We are aware of the issue, engineers are working to resolve. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Bet we would of got good ods that they would brake something...

[Robo]

Well at least they put it on their faults line this time.
I am still waiting to be connected and having to use 3G, I have got through to Krapoo after 40  minutes and they say that it is now due to the authentication server being overladed with some 8000 people trying to get back on.

[Hulligan]

Fuming. Been down since about 6am this morning. Apparently we should've only noticed a "5 minute downtime".

Worst part is, my next door but one neighbours old 1Mbit Package is working fine, and is the only way i can get on the net atm.

Karoo, if you're reading this - IF IT AINT BROKE. DONT BLOODY BREAK IT YOU NUMPTYS!

[Robo]

This is the longest 5 minutes I have ever encountered.
What a bunch of numpties they are.

[richardmyers]

Just managed to get back online, the bastards.

[Awibble]

Seriously, we can petition all we want, object all we want, but until they star tlistening to us here, on this forum and actually being active within the community we won't get anywhere. Outages like this are a complete and utter disgrace.

[bobthebuilder]

my net been on all day  not gone off once