LIGHTNING OUTAGE REPORT

This was a big one. Tuesday evening's violent thunderstorms included a direct strike on the W. Cornwall tower and significant damage to radios atop Bicentennial Hall. We were able to restore service through the night into Wednesday morning, but damaged gear in both locations failed again making diagnosis and repair even more problematic, and it was well into last evening before service was fully restored.

This season's expansion plans include redundant ring structure for our backbone radios which will make the possibility of this kind of outage nearly impossible. We continue to work to make NBN your best option for broadband service. Thanks for your patronage.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO CALL 382-8700 FOR CURRENT NETWORK STATUS  IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS!

Fiber Outage

One of our two fiber providers had a widespread outage--"most of Vermont"--between approximately 9:10 and 10:08am this morning. We were unable to shift all of our users over to our other provider by the time of restoral, so some users would probably have suffered almost nearly an hour without service. We are in the process of configuring the network so that all customers will automatically and nearly seamlessly move to the remaining upstream provider before this kind of rare event is likely to recur.

"Sweaty Backhaul" Revisited

We blew it--we missed the diagnosis. The instability issue in the Tuesday post persisted, intermittently, for the next two days. The problem turned out to be a faulty router power supply that was dropping power output level intermittently, which caused very confusing routing and authentication issues that appeared variously to be configuration problems, radio interference, or ethernet connectivity issues. We eventually solved the problem with a replacement of the power supply late Thursday afternoon.
Our New Years Resolution and promise to all: We are redesigning for all-DC power distribution and monitoring for all power parameters at major nodes, with automated alarm thresholds., to be instituted completely in 2014.

Sweaty Backhaul

Yesterday's severe temperature and humidity swing caused a major link from the W. Cornwall tower to the Ripton tower to become unstable, causing most Ripton customers to experience a "choppy" connection. The problem grew worse over the course of the day, and it was 1:30am this morning before we were finally able to stabilize it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience.

Email Server Certificates

OOPS! We missed the first annual renewal of our GeoTrust certificates--we thought that they would renew automatically, but we were wrong. Holders of nbnworks.net and ripton-coop.net email addresses are likely getting warnings from their email programs about the expired certificates, but most should be able to click through the warnings and connect. The problem should disappear tomorrow, or Tuesday at the latest.

New Link in a Hurry, Upgrade Report

Around 1:30pm this last Friday (11/1), the backhaul radio link from Peddlars Bridge to Old Town Road in Ripton failed. After informing and  consulting with the six affected customers in the village area , rather than expend time and energy to repair a link that we had scheduled for replacement, we elected to accelerate configuration and testing of two new high throughput radios and schedule the build for Saturday. Good weather allowed us to build a complete new high capacity direct link from the Hanson tower to the Leeds barn on Old Town Road and commission it by few minutes after 5:00pm on Saturday. We were also able to prepare cabling for replacement of the Leeds to Grip link sometime in the next week after new radios for that link arrive. Shortly after that we will deploy a new AP at the Grip location serving Village customers. This will significantly increase capacity in and out of the Village area.

At this point, we are happy to report that we have replaced all but one of the original 900 MHz radios served by the three original sector APs on the Hanson tower with our new high-capacity beam-forming solution. The replacement of the Grip AP and associated village clients, mentioned above, will mark the replacement of the second of the four older branch 900 APs and clients. At that point nearly 90% of our Ripton customers will be migrated to one of the new high speed platforms!

Rite of Autumn

In what has begun to seem like a tradition with the first frost on the mountain, one of the oldest network links, the Leeds to Grip radio required a reboot this morning. Four customers were without service from 6 through shortly after 8am this morning. Service was restored with the reboot. The radio responsible is scheduled for replacement before the snow flies.