PlusNet doing UnAnnouced Maintenace Break e-mail

Seems that the e-mail and portal access were broke due to monkies working on the network..


Anyone see an annoucement about this??

Makes you wonder why they announce Maintenace at all on the portal and by service status when they just go ahead whenever they want anyway.



Service: Portal
Posted: Mon, Sep 11 2006 at 09:05:21
Subject: E-mail and Portal Timeouts - UPDATE

This is an update to the previous announcement regarding access to email and our portal sites. The previous report can be found here:
http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,3222.0.html

Earlier this morning our network engineers were carrying out some maintenance work in order to improve performance between two of our sites.

During this maintenance traffic between the two sites was passing through one switch, which subsequently failed, causing all our portals, and our internal system to be unavailable. This was quickly restored, and the maintenance completed.

We are continuing to investigate issues relating to email collection, and will provide a further update shortly.

Kind Regards,
Mand Beckett
Customer Support

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Makes you wonder why they announce Maintenace at all on the portal and by service status when they just go ahead whenever they want anyway.

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Perhaps we should petition them to approach you in future for permission?

What's the big deal? It was down periodically during the night/early morning, and is now fine. Anyone would think that giving customers warning of maintenance was something that all hardware and software programs are capable of. Who's to know what happened.

About two years ago I asked my Dad why he used Plusnet? He liked the service info. The mail (and he used it a lot) could have been down for two days, and as long as PN said that it would have to be that way, he would put up with it, because he realised that systems don't run all the time, and can be a complete pita sometimes.

Of course, you can always take your business elsewhere....

I'm not sure but when I first read that I thought the work was being done to try and improve the performance in light of the problems that were being experienced with the portal and email since yesterday. I came to that conclusion because the info was an update to those problems. In this instance I would expect the engineers to do the work as a priority and for notice to be given only if they expected problems for the customer (a failing switch is not usually expected).

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only if they expected problems for the customer (a failing switch is not usually expected).

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Surely routing everything through one switch isn't the way to go though - so much for the resilient network!

And also, it took long enough to get the Service Status updated - it seems to have been quite a far reaching problem, affecting not only email but also portals and the CSC ability to get in to account details (due to how closely it's all tied in together). It's another reason why PlusNet really need to get the Service Status hosted on an off-site system where they can still access it. It also raises questions about how good the monitoring systems are, because it'd appear that the portals went down about 6:20am according to the bandwidth usage graphs (as they're tied in to the same system I believe, which is why they'd not be able to get the data from the specific bits of kit to show the graphing) yet the first SS update only happened at 9:05am.

PlusNet needs to treat the service like a professional ISP, and not one which is being run by some kids (not a personal attack at anyone) who are just ripping bits of kit out and replacing them without having proper plans and backups in place.

Thats the problem having a network so futuristic its 2 years ahead of every other ISP's I guess....

perhaps they cant afford to pay out of hours monkeys