[M5Hosting] Urgent Network Maintenance Tonight

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear Happy M5Hosting Customer,

	One of our main network providers (AmericanIS) will be performing
maintenance on the hardware and software of the equipment to which we
are directly attached. This work is to resolve an issue that was
discovered after a very brief event last Sunday night.
	The event last Sunday night occurred  when another customer of
AmericanIS produced an extreme increase in load, possibly due to a
Denial of Service attack or another unusual event). This negatively
affected the SUP720 Route Engine performance in the Cisco 6509's which
we are connect to AmericanIS through. This ultimately caused a brief
period of packet loss and high latency to our customer's whose traffic
flowed through AmericanIS at the time.
	The solution is to upgrade the SUP720 Engines to most powerful Route
Engines available for the Cisco 6509, the SUP720-3BXL. These engines
were already on hand, and this upgrade has already been performed on
other routers on the AmericanIS network that your traffic may pass
through to different destinations on the Internet. However, we are
directly connected to the last two routers to be upgraded.

	This upgrade will be performed between 22:00 and 23:59 US/Pacific Time,
tonight. (06:00 to 08:00 GMT Nov 11th, 2008) 

	During this time, the two 6509s will be upgrade one at a time. We are
connected to these two routers and using HSRP fail-over protocol, so
that there will be only a momentary pause in network traffic through
AmericanIS as each router is taken down for the upgrade. Except for the
brief pauses, the network is expected to remain up.

	This maintenance is being performed by one of our upstream providers.
This work is to upgrade their network devices to which we are connected.
The time and nature of the upgrade was chosen by them and not by
M5Hosting. AmericanIS has historically provided M5Hosting with very
highly reliable and high performance Internet transit service. This
upgrade is expected to keep that level of service.

	As always your feedback and comments relating to this announcement or
the work is describes is encouraged.

Thank you very much !
Mike

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Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com

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