Saturday, April 6, 2019

Blip, Scheduled Maintenance

We experienced some grid power anomalies last night around 11:10pm, and another interruption and failure to reboot of key equipment in our core rack. This caused a network outage until we manually restored power slightly less than an hour later. We had already planned and announced a maintenance window to upgrade our UPS equipment in that rack, scheduled for about 16 hours from now (3:00-5:00am, Sunday 4/7/2016). We expect this upgrade will supply conditioned bridging power for both minor power fluctuations and for the brief disruption of AC power during the automatic transfer to backup generation. Further, in the event of a full shutdown and simultaneous hard reboot of all rack equipment, it should be able to supply full startup peak power, which the previous implementation appears to have failed to do, dating from the relocation of our primary RADIUS server to that location.

We are taking the opportunity to update firmware and add some functionality to our core routing server during the maintenance window.