The servers will be offline and unavailable for a maximum of 3 hours on Saturday morning, from 10:00am till 1:00pm.

The downtime will be for routine maintenance on all servers, plus a hardware upgrade for the web server.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Stephanie.

Still working on the intermittent problem, and what should have been a painless “What if we try this?” knocked half of our connection down.

Everything is back up and running fine again now.

Allstream is continuing to monitor the circuit in order to catch any further connection-drops should they occur.

Of course, we are hopeful that the work that was done here today (they replaced some of their equipment) will prove to be the solution to the problems we’ve been having.

As before, if you do encounter any problems with the printers etc. please let me know.

I do not have an exact ETA but it will be some time in the next few hours, that they will arrive and shut things down for a little while so they can perform the service.

I will post a follow-up once the work has been completed.

Generally-speaking they are doing intensive testing after-hours, generally after 9:00pm every night (*) in an attempt to identify or isolate where the problem is happening. I appreciate that until the problem is fixed, it looks / feels like nothing is being done, but this is not the case. 

The testing will continue again tonight (after 9pm) and will continue until the problem is finally resolved.

* If you are using the system after business hours and you experience system problems overnight, please let me know the time if possible. Due to the intensive nature of the tests Allstream is running to try to locate the problem (sort of stress-testing the system) it’s possible that some outages / connection drops could be a result of the testing and not a result of the actual problem they’re trying to find.

At 21:00 (9pm) tonight they will be taking the T1 offline for one hour to conduct further in-depth tests on it to try and isolate where the faults are coming from.

In the meantime, please continue to report any printing problems or unexpected NorthstAr / PolAris disconnections to me. I haven’t received any reports for the past day or two, but I don’t want to mistakenly think the problem is fixed if it’s just that people have stopped telling me they’re experiencing trouble.

I remain convinced that the problem is on Allstream’s side of the situation, but unfortunately it means we’re working at their speed to fix it rather than being something I can deal with directly myself.

I will continue to post updates as information is available.

We’ve isolated just about everything we can, in terms of having new switch hardware, new cabling as of this morning, and they are continuing to analyze router traffic and status.

I will continue to post more news as it becomes available.