This morning (Thursday 17th March) we are experiencing problems with the University network. This is affecting all areas of the campus, including academic departments, wireless and ResNet.

The networks team are currently investigating the cause and working on a fix for this issue. We will post more details when they become available.

In the meantime, we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update 10:29 by Mark:

The network team has isolated the problem and all service are believed to be working.  We are currently in an 'At Risk' state as we are only running on one core router.  I'll update this again when the fully resilient service has been restored.

Update 12:38 by Mark:

We can now report that all services should have returned to normal. We have identified that a network switch was the cause of the problem and this has been isolated. For further updates please see the IS News Item for further updates.

We've been having ongoing problems with our database since the scheduled maintenance on Wednesday.  It was unavailable from 2am-8:30am Thursday, and the same again on Friday.  The database team are on the case, and the issue is severe enough that they've opened a support call with Oracle (who supply our database software).

We're waiting to hear back from Oracle, but it's likely that some of the ResNet systems will be unavailable for periods of time over the weekend.  The database team are planning to put some workarounds in place that should minimise the amount of time systems are unavailable.

The ResNet team are also investigating to see if there's anything we can do to minimise the impact on peoples connections, especially those who are due to move out of the bandwidth restricted network on Sunday night/Monday Morning.

Because of essential maintenance to one of the university database servers, the following services will be unavailable between 8:30am and 12:30am, Wednesday 2nd March.

• My ResNet Control Panel will be unavailable
• The ResNet Bandwidth Monitoring Gadget will not report data use correctly
• The ResNet Registration System will be unavailable
• The ResNet Live Status screens on the ResNet Website and the IS website will be unavailable

The helpdesk connection troubleshooting tools will also be unavailable, so there will be a diminished support capacity for ResNet until about 1pm.

For more information about other services which will be affected by this maintenance work, see the IS website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is/news/2011/diversp17feb.html

We experienced problems with ResNet Wireless in all areas overnight. Service was restored at around 9:30 this morning, and we are actively investigating the root cause in order to avoid similar problems in future.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused for you.

09:40 - We are currently experiencing problems with ResNet Wireless in all areas.  We are actively investigating this and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible.  In the meantime please use your wired connection as this is working fine.  This post will be updated as soon as there is any further information.

Update 09:50 - We believe this has been a problem since about midnight but has now been resolved.  The problem was with the primary authentication server but for some (currently unknown) reason the secondary server did not take over authentications.  This will be investigated further.

Due to essential network maintenance there will be a number of short interruptions, less than five minutes, to the network services on:

Tuesday 1st February 2011 between 08:00 - 10:00

These interruptions will affect the following area:

* Wills Hall (Stoke Bishop)

Information Services would like to apologise for any disruption caused by this work which is part of a continued programme of improvement to the network service.

If you have any questions or require further details please contact the IT help-desk.

As part of a programme of continued improvement and upgrades to the network, there will be interruptions to the network service at Langford on:

Tuesday 25 January between 07:30 - 09:00

At this time there will be an interruption to the data network of up to an hour during which the main Langford router will be replaced.

This will affect the Academic and ResNet data network for the entire site.  The telephone service will be unaffected during this outage.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update 2011-01-12 15:10 Because of the extent of the impact this work would have, it has been cancelled and will be rearranged for a later date.

(more...)

At 08:50 on Tuesday 11th Jan we lost power to our router that serves the following halls:

• Hiatt Bakter Hall
• Wills
• University Hall
• Badock Hall
• Churchill Hall
• Durdham
• and any other smaller locations in the Stoke Bishop Area

It seems that there is a power upgrade going on in Hiatt Baker which is the hall that feeds all others in Stoke Bishop.  Current estimate is that power will be down for 8 hours.  We are working through options for a temporary solution but given the short notice this may not be possible.  This post will be updated as and when we know more.

Update 09:30

It seems that this was a planned outage which we were not informed of.  Power has been restored and we assume the upgrade has been postponed.  Further updates when available.

It seems that one of our servers which provides My ResNet, the in-room registration system  and DNS for half of ResNet fell over on Friday evening.  Some people will have experienced slow connections as their connections failed over to the secondary DNS server.

As the office isn't staffed at weekends, I only happened to notice it by chance.  I've restarted the server and normal service was restored at around 14:45 on Sunday.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.