How to order changes to your HICS circuit route or termination point

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Chris Seviour

From time to time schools find that they need to arrange for physical changes to their connectivity circuit. The two most common reasons for this are:

  1. You are planning building works at the school which are likely to interfere with your broadband circuit … so you need to arrange for the route of the circuit to be changed.
  2. You are refurbishing part of the interior of the school … perhaps creating a server room where there was none before or moving your server room location … so you need to arrange for the termination point of your circuit along with the router or modem to be moved.

We are happy to make these arrangements for you and we will pay Updata for the work and then recover the costs from you.  If you require such a change this is the process to follow:

  1. You fill out the form Quotation Request Form and email it to me (chris.seviour@hertscc.gov.uk).
  2. I will send the Form to Updata who will provide a quotation.
  3. I will then pass the quotation to you for your approval … that means your approval for me to recover these costs from you once the work is completed.
  4. Once you have indicated your approval I will order the work from Updata.
  5. In some cases, after a detailed survey, Updata may issue a revised quotation.  In such cases I will seek your approval again before asking them to proceed.
  6. Once the work is completed to your satisfaction we will pay Updata and then recover the costs from you.

This work will usually be carried out by the supplier of your circuit … either BT Openreach  or Virgin Media.  Both organisations take a while to mobilise so please try to give at least a couple of months notice if possible.

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What’s my contention ratio?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Chris Seviour

I am frequently asked this question and I imagine it is by people who are used to questioning their home ISP about their ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) connection.

All of our sites have symmetrical connections to their local exchange giving you typically 8 Mbps or 100 Mbps each way. Those links are completely uncontended … no one else’s traffic travels on your link.  (The only exception to that is where a school and a neighbouring Children’s Centre have elected to share a single connection.)

At the local exchange you join the HICS core network. This is described here.  The core network is managed so that it has considerably more capacity than is required … in fact the circuits on the central ring of the core network have just been upgraded to 1 Gbps.  Clearly this core network provides many possible routes for traffic providing resilience against any individual route experiencing a fault.

Traffic that is destined for the Internet is routed through to one of a resilient pair of data centres where capacity onto the Internet is again managed to be more than sufficient for peak demand.  For increased resilience each data centre has a different Internet provider.

There are various ways you can monitor the performance of the service. These are described here.

So it’s a very different set-up from a domestic ADSL service.

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Planned maintenance: Upgrade to the core network

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Chris Seviour

The planned maintenance work on the core network which I mentioned here is nearly complete. This has involved the upgrade of some of the central circuits from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps.  The physical aspect of this is finished and Updata are now just completing the reconfiguration.  All of this has been done without disruption to schools.

It is unlikely that you will notice any difference.  The purpose of the upgrade has been to increase the capacity to add more sites to the network without detriment to existing users … and of course the more sites there are to share the costs the better for everyone.

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Update on web filtering issue

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Chris Seviour

Updata worked through Friday and over the weekend to identify the root cause of the filtering issue I have highlighted in recent posts.  As a result we do not expect any co-occurrence of the early morning disruption some schools experienced on two occasions last week.

Any proxy that goes into an error state (displaying the message “Access denied – database error”) will now be immediately removed from service.  This automated process was failing but was fixed over the weekend.

The underlying cause of proxies going into an error state has been identified and Updata are working with Netsweeper to rectify it ASAP.  (Because there are more than sufficient proxies over all and because the automated process for removing a failing proxy has been fixed if there should be further failures to individual proxies these should be completely transparent and non-disruptive to service.)

In the post below I mentioned some anomalies that occurred when traffic was switched to run entirely through one data centre so that problems in the other could be worked on.  The cause of these anomalies is still under investigation by  Updata – the two issues above were considered to be the priorities.

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Friday 2nd March: All traffic cut over to LD5 data centre

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Chris Seviour

All traffic was cut over to the LD5 data centre early this morning causing disruption to service for some schools.

There are 5 proxy servers in each of the two data centres which is more than enough capacity. If a proxy should fail then it should be removed from service but this automated process has itself been failing. This results in a failure to access any web pages for any device in a school which has its traffic routed to the faulty proxy. This explains why the problem is only seen by some schools and then only by some devices in those schools.

On the two occasions this week when this issue has arisen all traffic has been cut over to the “healthy” data centre. This cut over restores the web service to everyone immediately but has resulted in some anomalies which take about an hour to clear through. These include all access being filtered through the WF3 central policy whatever proxy settings may be in force and the occasional display of the wrong “Access Denied” message.

We do of course understand and apologise for the frustration that this run of disruption causes and Updata are dealing with it at the highest priority level. We have asked that they implement manual proxy health checks overnight so that any recurring faults can be dealt with before schools start work .. which is 7.00 am for many.

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