881W/1041N Maintainence Performed

[Mikerowaved]

I just noticed this was posted last Friday on tm.lds.org:

Wireless Maintenance Completed

Maintenance on the 881W and 1041N wireless infrastructure was performed Friday, March 15th at 10 AM Mountain Time. Exhaustive measures were taken to minimize impact. Please contact the GSC if you are experiencing any problems.

Did anyone experience any problems? Improvements?

[Biggles]

We suffered intermittent Internet access, on Saturday especially during the morning. This improved slowly throughout the day. This was extremely unfortunate as we had a Youth Stake Conference, on that day, heavily orientated towards Family History requiring reliable Internet access!

The original bulletin stated a 10 AM start on the 15th, as we in the UK are 7-8 hours ahead of MT, that equates to 5-6 PM on the Friday. We suspect that the work didn't finish until the early hours of Saturday morning MT. Thus affecting us at the most crucial time.

The bulletin quoted above appeared at about midday, on Saturday in the UK, but note that the date that the bulletin shows is still the 14th!

At the moment no difference seen. I suspect this work was done to prepare for the filtering changes also noted on TM.

[sj3vans]

I noticed that also when installing a new 881 on Monday. So it states:

Exhaustive measures were taken to minimize impact.

Did those measures include letting us know about that maintenance in advance? Did I just miss it? Perhaps I'm just not on the right email list.

[aebrown]

I noticed that also when installing a new 881 on Monday. So it states:

Exhaustive measures were taken to minimize impact.

Did those measures include letting us know about that maintenance in advance? Did I just miss it? Perhaps I'm just not on the right email list.

No email was sent, as far as I can tell. My guess is that because they took these measures to minimize impact, they decided they didn't need to go to the effort to send out an email.

At this point, we have one report that there may have been an impact, but with just one report I don't know if it was directly related to this maintenance procedure or something else.

[sj3vans]

I'm glad there were no problems and it sounds like the worked hard to minimize risk. However, when dealing in large numbers. even small risks will manifest themselves. I'll never forget the time early in my network career that I thought I could make a quick and simple change to a firewall and ended up taking down several thousand user's access to key systems. The firewall just froze up. I'd never heard of that happening to anyone else, but it happened to me that once so I always assume it can happen again and weigh the impact that it will cause.

In this case, a simple email to all of the Stake Technology Specials would probably have been sufficient to completely mitigate the risk. We would be able to ensure that if we have an event scheduled during or right after a maintenance window, to take extra precautions or rescheduling the event.

There should be a permanent email address alias associated with the STS calling tied in via the CDOL and forwarded automatically to the email address associated with my LDS account. Something like UnitNumber_STS@ldschurch.net. I know, I only want the world! For that matter, there should be permanent email alias for all leadership positions allowing me to hit the AVS or YMP at any unit without knowing who they are or wondering if distribution list is up to date. The Stake Clerk can do that for some callings like Bishops, but not for others like AVS. Okay, I'll come out of my dreamland back to reality.

Can't HQ send an email to all STS now though?

[aebrown]

Can't HQ send an email to all STS now though?

Yes. There are two methods; they can certainly just send an email to all stake clerks and/or all stake technology specialists based on their callings as recorded in MLS and stored in CDOL, using their email address associated with their membership record. Or they can use the Technology Specialist Newsletter subscription list.

[gbekmezian]

I just noticed this was posted last Friday on tm.lds.org:

Wireless Maintenance Completed

Maintenance on the 881W and 1041N wireless infrastructure was performed Friday, March 15th at 10 AM Mountain Time. Exhaustive measures were taken to minimize impact. Please contact the GSC if you are experiencing any problems.

Did anyone experience any problems? Improvements?

The upgrade was driven by stability improvements and a defect which was impacting some of our users in Europe. If you didn't notice anything, then it was a success.

[gbekmezian]

We suffered intermittent Internet access, on Saturday especially during the morning. This improved slowly throughout the day. This was extremely unfortunate as we had a Youth Stake Conference, on that day, heavily orientated towards Family History requiring reliable Internet access!

The maintenance was completed by 2PM Mountain time. It is more likely you were having unrelated problem if your experience was on Saturday. Were those Family History computers wired or wireless? The maintenance was specific to wireless access points (both the embedded AP in the 881W and the standalone 1041 AP). If your machines were wired, then there is 0 probability your incident was related to the maintenance.

[gbekmezian]

I'm glad there were no problems

So are we!

In this case, a simple email to all of the Stake Technology Specials would probably have been sufficient to completely mitigate the risk. We would be able to ensure that if we have an event scheduled during or right after a maintenance window, to take extra precautions or rescheduling the event.

Noted. We did consider alternate notification methods for this, but the easiest and most readily available means of communication we have available to us is messages through Technology Manager. A broad announcement via email requires special approvals, which we felt were not warranted in this case. We were able to upgrade 25,000+ access points with no notable increase in support calls. I hope that makes sense.

[sj3vans]

Actually, I have no problem with using TM for this if that is an easy way to communicate such info. If I know I need to check that weekly, I'd gladly do that if I know there might be important announcements there. I did not experience any issues with the latest upgrade, but it is always nice to be in the loop. A note in TM indicating such changes a week ahead of time would be a great start. Thanks.