Flaky AP
Over the last several days we have seen an issue develop with our Sector H2 Access Point radio. This causes brief disconnects of the nine clients on that sector with variable frequency.
After investigating and checking all probable causes short of replacing the entire unit on the tower the problem persists. We have ordered a suitable radio to be express shipped from California.
We started out today with a primary goal of restoring the Hanson tower to Flinner barn point to point link, and additionally planned to replace a compromised cable to a dedicated service radio on the tower. By mid-afternoon both of those goals had been accomplished but not before a surprise network outage between around 10:30 and 11:45 in the morning. It appears that the root cause of some of our recent issues was a series of rolling port malfunctions in a core layer three switch; just such a problem caused a loss of connectivity to our primary backhaul radio. Fortunately, once we determined the problem--totally unrelated to our cabling work in process--we were able to bring online a redundant pair of backhaul radios already in place.
We have ordered a replacement switch on overnight delivery, and have relocated some equipment to available ports on another switch to guard against any recurrence before the new switch is in place.
The overall damage:
Several Old Town Road and Ripton village center customers experiencing choppy service through complete outage from approximately mid-day Saturday through 2:00pm this afternoon. A complete outage for all customers from approximately 10:30 to 11:45 this morning.
We apologize for the disruptions and truly appreciate your patience and understanding.
We lost the radio link from Hanson to the Old Town Road barn late this morning and have been unable to restore it from the ground. We do not have a tower climber available until Monday, unfortunately, so it will be mid-day Monday before it's restored. This means that Ripton customers on Old Town Road and in the immediate Village area will be without service until then. We apologize for the anticipated long outage and will post here when and if the situation changes. Customers should remember that they can always check the NETWORK STATUS LINE at (802) 382-8700 for the most immediate updates.
We were able to find a wiring fault causing the problems with the Hanson to Flinner link and repair it, restoring full service to the village and Old Town Road locations at about 4:30pm this afternoon.
Thanks to all for your patience.
We continue to have (escalating) problems with the same radio. We are going onsite to see if we can effect a solution from the ground.
Same radio just flapped and reassociated at half duplex. We got into it and locked it at 100FDX. We'll see how this goes.
In the last half hour we discovered and mitigated a problem in a single radio link--the connection from Hanson to Flinner on Old Town Road. This appears to have caused intermittent connection problems for customers in the immediate Ripton village area and on Old Town Road beginning at around 11:30. The radio was not properly autonegotiating connection speed with our switch at Gigabit speed and we were able to manually set the ethernet speed to 100FDX temporarily, restoring a stable connection. This probably indicates a cabling or ethernet port problem on the radio. We are planning on being on the Hanson tower later in the week and will be investigating further.
