[Greennet-l] Important: GreenNet Downtime Dec 11 2003 and 0845 number outage

[GreenNet User Support]

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Dear GreenNet User,

this support announcement concerns two issues:

(1) the 0845 number 'outage' between 28/11 - 3/12

(2) downtime tomorrow Dec 11 2003 8.00-8.30am


ad (2) Our servers are getting moved to a different space in the server 
room. We have been informed about this only today and apologise for the 
short notice for our hosting provider. We have agreed to have this done 
early in the morning so the impact on our users would be minimal. 
Affected services: E-mail (send/receive), web sites 
E-mail: During this time you will not be able to send or receive email 
through our mail server (mail.gn.apc.org). Mail sent to your account will be delayed 
but not lost. It will arrive as soon as the server is connected to the 
network again as it is being held on a secondary mail server during the 
down time. If you try to send mail through the server you will receive an 
error message basically stating that the server cannot be reached. Please 
wait a while and then try sending your mail again.
Web Sites: almost all web sites hosted by GreenNet will be unreachable 
during this short period. (In order to find out if your site is affected 
go to to this web site: http://webservices.greennet.org.uk/hosting/
and enter your web site name. If your site is hosted on one of the Linux 
servers then it is affected by the downtime.)

ad (1) GreenNet would like to offer apologies for the severe connection
problems on the 0845 059 0040 dial-up number over the weekend of 29-30
November.  Problems continued for many members in London and the
surrounding areas during the following Monday and Tuesday, and those
were finally resolved on the morning of 3 December.  During this time,
people dialling in would intermittently receive a variety of errors or
partial connections, and at times even repeated redialling would not
establish any modem connection.  This also affected a number of other
ISPs who use modems at Poptel.

We are still waiting for more information on the incident from Poptel,
but the immediate cause was a firewall configuration problem followed
by a series of 'internal hang-ups' between Poptel, BT and Your
Communications.  Some relatively minor difficulties on Tuesday 9th
were owing to some diagnostic checks which we weren't warned about.

One or two people have reported continued problems and the modem
handshaking taking longer over the last few weeks.  We are unaware of
any reason behind this.  While the usual response to isolated errors
is changes in the dial-up settings, this is not appropriate in the
case of a fault upstream.  However some users with old (pre-2000) 56K
modems may get some improvement if they check the modem manufacturer's
websites for firmware upgrades.

In response to the point that users would prefer 'busy' tones to
repeated failed connections, we are told this is difficult to arrange 
since the next fault with the phone lines can't be predicted.

We're continuing to ask our suppliers for greater reliability, and
hope you see some improvements soon.


Best regards



GreenNet Support Team.
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