Although you may not have noticed, we at OpenAccess were busy during the summer of 2005, performing a comprehensive upgrade to our network.?

Although the bulk of the work was done during the summer, we completed it during the fall, in particular for the Fairhaven District of Bellingham and the installation of new network management equipment that provides us with more advanced capabilities to monitor and manage the network.

The key changes include:

1. Upgrade of all core points of presence to have fully redundant routers and switches.? This means that if a swich or router fails, there is no or?limited?impact?to network operations.

Unfortunately, the process of moving from single routers/switches to fully redundant pairs of routers/switches resulted in unexpected outages.? We apologize for this. We worked very hard all summer to minimize the impact of this work, performing most of it in the wee hours of the morning and trying to retroactively map the circuits on our network.

This portion of our summer upgrades was by far the most difficult for us and our customers.? Despite this, it has been well worth it.? The redundant configurations we now?have mean that our network is much more resilient to equipment failures and we can take equipment offline to service without disrupting customer connections.? So, future core upgrades will be easier for us and invisible to our customers.

2. Upgrading our webservers.? We are now standardized on CPANEL for our webhosting products, and although we have about 100 customers still?on the old (and very worn-out) servers, the outcome is good.?

Thanks to all of you who worked with us as we moved your accounts off the old servers to the new ones!??

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