[M5Hosting] Urgent Network Maintenance Tonight

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear M5Hosting Customer,

     The upgrade being performed by AIS on the AIS network has  
exceeded their announced time window. There has also been a greater  
impact on the service than expected starting near the end of their  
announced window. Their very capable Network Engineers are working  
diligently to complete the upgrade.
     While this is work being performed on a network not in our  
control, I have been on-site at the data center myself for the  
duration of the maintenance, and will continue to be for any  
contingency that may require our action and to get first hand updates  
and to render updates to you if needed.
     The original plan was for very brief interruptions to cut over  
from one router to another. However, there have been a few periods of  
packet loss and latency on their network during this maintenance. This  
has affected our network and service to our customers, some routes are  
affected less than others.

     Any further updates to tonights work will be made at  
http://m5status.blogspot.com  but you are welcome to contact us  
directly if you have specific questions not otherwise addressed.

Thank you !
Mike


Quoting Michael J McCafferty <mike at m5computersecurity.com>:

> 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
>
> --
> ************************************************************
> Michael J. McCafferty
> Principal, Security Engineer
> M5 Hosting
> http://www.m5hosting.com
>
> You can have your own custom Dedicated Server up and running today !
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>
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-- 
************************************************************
Michael J. McCafferty
Principal Engineer
M5 Hosting
877-344-HOST x501 Voice
http://www.m5hosting.com
************************************************************