News
Campus Networking Issues
Tuesday 5th November 2008
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We apologise for disruption to IT service this week.
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While the symptoms include loss of Learn, corporate, and e-mail systems, the underlying cause is with the data network, which has historically been very reliable.
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We are working under the advice of our contracted network support engineers to wholly resolve the problem, as a matter of the utmost urgency.
More detail (only for those interested)
I am writing to apologise for the IT service outages experienced this week, and explain what we are doing to resolve the matter.
We experienced a number of issues with external hackers trying to disrupt our Internet connectivity (so called Denial of Service attacks), which caused some user disruption before the attacks were successfully repelled.
However, the main cause of user disruption has been that a Cisco core network router device has spontaneously reset itself, first on Monday afternoon (3 November), and again late Wednesday morning (5 November). The brief failure of the core router causes a brief interruption to our external Internet connection, and core servers to become detached. There is a delay while servers, including those providing e-mail, Learn, and corporate services re-establish their network connections.
Data from the core router were provided on Monday to senior Cisco engineers, under our support contract, and Cisco came back this morning with a diagnosis of router software error, and recommendation to urgently upgrade router software version. We were originally planning to perform this upgrade out of hours this evening, but the second router reset recurred at around 11:20 a.m., at which point we decided to perform the recommended software upgrade there and then. Our advice is that this will resolve the matter, but please be assured that will be monitoring the very situation closely henceforth, and will respond quickly should any further problems arise.
A detailed account was sent yesterday to IT contacts and IT information lists, and further more detailed updates will be provided via those channels.
Once again, we apologise for the inconvenience and disruption to your work.
Regrads,
Dr Phil Richards
Director of IT Services