Planned Maintenence History
This page contains old Planned Maintenance announcements that are no longer relevant, but could be of interest.
Note the When column indicates when the notice was posted, not when maintenance is planned
| When | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| 2010-07-27 09:27:28 | ben | Tuesday 27/07/2010 after 18:00 we will be loading new firmware onto turnpike, an FB6000 bonded tunnel head-end. This will result in an outage of about 15 seconds for those tunnel bonded customers connected via turnpike. If things go wrong there is a risk of an outage of up to 10 minutes while we back out the change. |
| 2010-06-08 14:53:08 | ben | On Wednesday 9th June between 22:00 - 03:00 BST, all our Be-provided ADSL will suffer an outage of around 20 minutes. This is because Fluidata (who provide our Be ADSL backhaul) are migrating our interconnect to a new hardware platform, to allow for future growth.
Apologies for any problems this may cause. |
| 2010-06-01 16:28:59 | kev | Sunday 6th at 17:48 - This maintenance has now been completed - apologies for the overrun on time. On Sunday 06/06/10 between 15:00 and 16:00 we will be upgrading firmware on our core switches 'beatrix' and 'korenwolf' in Maidenhead. Each upgrade will necessitate a reboot, which will result in a connectivity outage of around a minute to connected equipment. At sometime during this window all ADSL connections will be reset as the switches connecting the ADSL LNSes are upgraded. |
| 2010-04-06 16:28:44 | kev | This maintenance has now been completed.
We will shortly be updating our core switching configuration in the light of the weekend's GVRP problems. This is not expected to affect connectivity. |
| 2010-03-26 23:41:54 | kev | This maintenance has now been completed.
We will be updating various core router configurations over the weekend 27/3 & 28/3 to prepare for forthcoming network upgrades. These changes are not expected to be service affecting. |
| 2010-01-22 12:59:15 | kev | This maintenance has now been completed.
On Sunday 07/02/10 we will be performing maintenance in our Amsterdam datacentre as part of an ongoing plan to improve connectivity and resilience. This work includes: upgrading the switch 'Vlo', re-cabling various network connections and re-arranging power cables. There will be brief outages, possibly more than one, but expected to be no more than a few minutes in duration, of connectivity to colo equipment in this datacentre as cables are moved. It is hoped that power to customer severs will not need to be interrupted. Customers whose machines are at risk will be contacted in advance. As with the previous VLAN re-configuration, all changes will, of course, be thoroughly tested. If you experience any problems, please contact support using the usual channels. |
| 2010-01-22 12:53:36 | kev | This maintenance has now been completed. Apologies to those customers whose machines suffered outages of minutes rather than seconds - this was caused by switch MAC caches taking longer to update than expected.
We will be reconfiguring VLANs in our Amsterdam datacentre on Friday 22/01/10 shortly after 18:00. This will have a very brief impact (expected to be < 10 seconds) on connectivity to colo equipment in this datacentre as connections are switched. All changes will, of course, be thoroughly tested. If you experience any problems, please contact support using the usual channels. |
| 2009-09-18 19:16:27 | kev | The VLAN re-configuration in Maidenhead has been completed successfully. |
| 2009-09-03 21:26:37 | kev | On Sunday (06/09/09) afternoon we will be reorganising VLANs in our Maidenhead datacentre as part of a program to further improve switching resilience.
Most colo customers will suffer a brief period when routing vanishes (expected to be just a few seconds) as VLANs are switched. We will post an all clear once the work has been completed. |
| 2009-01-12 08:40:48 | ben | Yesterday's maintenance went to plan, with just a single short outage. Please see the status page for more details. |
| 2009-01-08 13:40:43 | ben | Following the ATM box failure on Tuesday (see status page), we will be testing a hot-swap backup ATM box this Sunday 11th Jan. This will result in one or two ADSL outages, of a few minutes each. This will only affect those lines still on 20CN (i.e. those affected by Tuesday's outage), ADSL on 21CN should be unaffected.
We do apologise for this, but feel it is necessary, in order to be confident we won't suffer a similar outage should the ATM box fail again in the future. |
| 2008-12-24 12:52:34 | kev | We have been advised that BT will be carrying out network upgrades between 8th and 16th January covering a number of exchanges. The work will be performed overnight between 00:00 and 06:00 and could mean as long as an hour of downtime. |
| 2008-12-05 11:36:44 | ben | One of our transit providers will be doing planned maintenance this Sunday 7th December. This means that some transit may suffer a brief outage of up to a minute. Apologies if this affects you. |
| 2008-12-01 16:24:58 | ben | We have completed the aforementioned maintenance of our phone system |
| 2008-12-01 14:15:19 | ben | There will be a brief outage of our phone system this afternoon, as we carry out planned maintenance. If you need to contact us and find our phones are not working, please email support@watchfront.net. In emergency please call 07812 811116 |
| 2008-07-14 16:44:36 | kev | Maintenance on the webserver has been completed. |
| 2008-07-14 13:53:44 | kev | Later today we will be performing maintenance on our main webserver. There will be short periods during which our (and some of our customers) websites are unavailable. We will post an 'all-clear' once the work is complete. |
| 2008-07-13 20:01:21 | kev | The mailserver upgrade is complete. If you see anything behaving unexpectedly, please call support! |
| 2008-07-13 18:14:07 | kev | The mailserver upgrade will begin shortly. |
| 2008-07-11 12:04:47 | ben | We are planning maintenance on our primary mail server this Sunday 13th July. This will mean that user mailboxes will be unavailable for brief periods during the day. Outgoing email will be unaffected, and incoming email will be queued on our secondary mail server during the outages, so that no emails are lost or bounced. We will post more details nearer the time. |
| 2007-11-21 17:46:31 | kev | Over the next few days we will be moving various websites to new servers. During this time, there will be periods when update by FTP and web password changing will be unavailable. (N.B only updates will be affected - there should be no periods when actual websites are unavailable.) If you are affected and need to update urgently, please contact support, who will be able to make the necessary arrangements. |
| 2007-06-13 14:05:44 | ben | On Friday 15th June, at around 10am, we are doing routine maintenance on our secondary mail and secondary DNS server (dominator.watchfront.net). This will result in an outage of that server of around 15 minutes. As these are secondary services, this should have no effect on our customers, though we will be without DNS resilience during the outage. |
| 2007-04-27 16:31:38 | kev | This Friday (after midnight) the L2TP machine is being reloaded. This should not result in any problems. If on Saturday there is no connectivity on any of your lines please reboot the appropriate router.
On Sunday, one of the 2 core routers is being replaced. This should have no impact as the network is designed to operate on just one of them should the other fail. If your connection is lost for some reason during this operation *do not* reboot your router. If you have any problems please call our support number +44 20 7517 4902 |
| 2007-04-11 14:20:53 | ben | As announced, our mail server has been upgraded successfully |
| 2007-04-10 23:23:40 | kev | Our main mailserver will be unavailable for a few minutes around midday on Wednesday 11/04/07 whilst it has a RAM upgrade. Mail will continue to be accepted by our backup mailserver during this period, but collection of mail will be unavailable. We will post an all-clear when the work is complete. If you have any problems please call support on 020 7517 4902. |
| 2007-03-27 15:26:17 | ben | The radius server for our ADSL and SDSL customers is being replaced tomorrow morning. This should have no effect on our services, unless the changeover fails AND a DSL customer tries reconnecting whilst the radius server is down. |
| 2007-03-19 11:16:07 | ben | We are replacing our main telephone switch this evening (Monday 19th March), so the phones will be down between 18:00 and 20:00. If you need to contact support during this period, please email support@watchfront.net, or in emergency call 07812 811116. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2007-02-21 14:23:10 | ben | On Thursday 22nd February our datacentre in London (TelecityRedbus) will be subject to a power blackout test, to ensure the backup UPS and Generator system works correctly. This is a routine test carried out by TelecityRedbus, and should have no impact on our services. However there is a small risk that things could go wrong! |
| 2007-01-19 11:04:35 | ben | On Sunday 21st Jan at 11am we will be carrying out maintenance on our primary mail server. The server will be down for approximately one hour. The aim of the maintenance is to improve the efficiency of the server, as recently it has become sluggish under high loads. If you use webmail or imap, you may have to re-subscribe to your mail folders after this maintenance. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2007-01-19 11:03:48 | ben | On Wednesday 24th Jan our datacentre in London (TelecityRedbus) will be subject to a power blackout test, to ensure the backup UPS and Generator system works correctly. This is a routine test carried out by TelecityRedbus, and should have no impact on our services. However there is a small risk that things could go wrong! |
| 2006-10-06 18:32:00 | KRH | All clear for now! |
| 2006-10-06 13:08:00 | JBM | We will be carrying out emergency maintenance on our primary mail server, today starting between 17:00 and 17:30. This is likely to result in an outage of up to 30 minutes. We are replacing the hard drives, following the problems we had yesterday. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2006-09-21 16:30:00 | JBM | We will be carrying out maintenance on the ATM interface on Sunday 24/09/2006, to avoid a repetition of today's DSL outages. This may cause a brief outage for DSL customers. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2006-07-09 11:40:00 | KRH | We've just been informed that today's planned work has been postponed, so 'All Clear' for today. |
| 2006-07-05 10:30:00 | KRH | This coming Sunday, 09/07/2006, our primary transit provider in London will be upgrading their core routers. During the upgrade, we will be switched to backup routers, so this should have no effect. If there are any problems please contact support. We will post an 'all clear' once work has been completed. |
| 2005-05-19 15:30:00 | JBM | On Sunday 22nd May there will be maintenance work at our London data centre, which will affect all our ADSL customers for around 10 minutes between 06:00 and 06:30. This should not affect other services such as server colocation. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2005-05-05 13:50:00 | KRH | On Sunday 8th May we are planning an upgrade to our London data centre power feed, as previously scheduled for April 24th. All London based services will be shutdown starting at 15:00 and should be fully restored by 16:00. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2005-04-24 15:20:00 | JBM | Redbus have just informed us, 10 minutes before the planned power feed upgrade, that they are unable to do it today :-(. So it is postponed for now, and we will let you know when it is rearranged. |
| 2005-04-18 18:20:00 | JBM | On Sunday 24th April we are planning an upgrade to our data centre power feed, as a result of the recent power outage. This will result in a 10 minute outage of all services between 15:00 and 16:00. We will be contacting all colocation customers nearer the time to arrange controlled server shutdown. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2005-01-20 17:15:00 | JBM | On Monday 24th January we are planning upgrades to our main web, mail, and dns servers. This may result in an outage of around two minutes on each server if they require a reboot. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. |
| 2004-11-24 10:40:00 | JBM | Our main transit provider is planning an emergency upgrade of a switch sometime today, to avoid future recurrence of the packet loss problems we have been seeing recently. The upgrade should not affect Watchfront customers. |
| 2004-10-20 19:50:00 | JBM | The planned maintenance of Confused and Chiswick (see below) is complete and all services are back to normal. |
| 2004-10-19 17:40:00 | JBM | We are planning emergency maintenance on Confused (secondary mail and DNS), tomorrow 20/10/2004, as the hard drive is starting to fail. As this is a secondary server you should not notice any outage. We are also taking the opportunity to do emergency preventative maintenance on Chiswick (our main mail and web server), replacing his hard drive as it is of similar vintage to that in Confused. This unfortunately will mean a 30 minute outage of Chiswick. No email will be lost during this outage but it could be delayed by up to 30 minutes. This will happen tomorrow afternoon. Apologies for the short notice. |
| 2004-09-09 14:55:00 | KRH | The upgrade to Chiswick went smoothly (you can see this message, after all:) |
| 2004-09-08 12:00:00 | JBM | Our planned server upgrade is now going to happen tomorrow Thursday 9th September around lunchtime, which will result in about a 5 minute outage of both incoming and outgoing email, and of our main web server. Apologies for the last-minute change of plan. |
| 2004-09-07 12:00:00 | JBM | We are planning a server upgrade tomorrow Wednesday 8th September around lunchtime, which will result in about a 5 minute outage of both incoming and outgoing email, and of our main web server. We are also installing some new servers, and will be splitting mail and web services in the near future. |
| 2004-05-25 12:50:00 | JBM | On 26th May, between 03:00 and 06:00 hours, Level 3 (one of our transit providers) are upgrading their routers. All traffic should route via Abovenet during the outage, so no customers should be affected. |
| 2004-05-18 00:00:00 | JBM | We are planning to replace the hard drive in our primary authoritative dns server (ns0.watchfront.net and local caching server 217.169.24.209), following the problems we had on the 18th. The server will be down for around an hour or two during the morning of Wednesday 19th May, but our secondary dns server (ns1.watchfront.net and local caching server 217.169.31.244) should provide full backup during this time so no-one should be affected. |
| 2004-05-18 00:00:00 | JBM | BT have advised us they will be doing planned maintenance on their ADSL network on Wednesday 19th May between 05:00 and 07:00 hours. ADSL customers may experience a brief (10 minute) outage during this time. Apologies in advance for any inconveniences. |
| 2003-11-07 00:00:00 | JBM | BT are planning to reconfigure some routers in the ADSL network on Friday 7th November between 05:00 and 07:00. They say 'no end users will lose service as a result of this work due to network resilience being in place'. The upgrade involves increasing the MTU within BT's network from 1500 to 1900. |
| 2003-05-07 00:00:00 | JBM | We are planning some major changes to our core routers on Sunday 11th May. There will be some outages affecting all customers, including ADSL and hosted servers. We will keep this to a minimum, and secondary DNS and mail servers will be unaffected. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause - these changes are necessary to improve the resilience of our services. |
| 2003-04-07 00:00:00 | JBM | Customer web sites are now on a new server - this should not affect users in any way. |
| 2003-03-31 00:00:00 | JBM | We are moving mail services to a new mail server. Most users will be unaffected - we are contacting those who are. Please check you are sending to smtp.watchfront.net and collecting from pop3.watchfront.net |
| 2003-02-26 00:00:00 | JBM | We will be moving customer web sites to a new server, and will let you know more details nearer the time. |