« Reading List: The Commentaries | Main | Fourmilab: Running on new leased line »
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Fourmilab: Scheduled Internet service outage 2007-08-09
Tomorrow, August 9th, 2007, Fourmilab's Internet connectivity is scheduled for a brief interruption due to a switch-over from Fourmilab's Internet Service Provider's (ISP) Point of Presence (POP) in Bern to a new, closer POP in St. Blaise. The cut-over should occur some time between 13:00 and 16:00 UTC, (15:00–18:00 local time), and is expected to be about 15 minutes in length; during the transition, packets sent to Fourmilab will disappear without a trace. E-mail and other protocols which retry failed connections should experience no loss of data, and attempts to access Web pages and applications will simply time out. The actual change in connectivity consists simply of moving a patch cable from the old router and modem to the new ones, but the ISP must then adjust their routing tables and the change propagate around the Internet until full connectivity will be restored. If something goes wrong, the old connection remains available, and a fall-back to it can be accomplished in another 15 minutes or so. Of course, with this kind of thing you never know, but we've taken every precaution to keep the maximum outage in the worst case (barring the kind of absurdly improbable cascade of misfortune which seems to happen regularly here) to less than an hour. We'll see…. I'll post an update here when connectivity is restored, whatever the outcome of the switch-over attempt.Posted at August 8, 2007 20:03