Hi, just got this email from our hosting provider. It shouldn't be too bad but if you notice some intermittent down time you'll know why.
Dear Customer,
Hosting365 is upgrading it's network! 2006 has been a big year for us. We've grown more this year than all other years
combined ... and experienced the various 'pains' that can bring - we've more than doubled our technical and support
staff, increased our power capacity, and our network now needs to be modified to more efficiently deal with the number
of devices on it, and level of network traffic being conducted.
The network upgrade will take place during Christmas week - the 27th to the 30th of December. If you have any questions
around this don't hesitate to contact us using the details below.
It should be noted that this is a customer affecting upgrade and at some point during the 4 day maintenance period,
connectivity will be periodically affected. We will do our best to ensure this is kept to an absolute minimum, and
would not expect it to be more than a few minutes as changes are implement and new equipment installed.
The work is being performed to improve the stability and reliability of the network. We have two uplinks from the
access switches in the cabinets to the core switches for redundancy, as the network has grown very quickly we need to
reduce the amount of spanning-tree calculations that need to be completed on the network. This will also mean
amendments on the configuration of the access switches and core switch. We have found a bug in our core switch - VT
pruning, which is also a feature we would like to disable; this has caused loss of connectivity to some servers for
a period of time which we believed before to be ARP problems. However, with testing we have discovered it is vtp
pruning.
We apologise for this inconvenience and hope you understand that the result will be a far stronger network architecture
that will provide better resilience for all customers.
All the best this holiday season,
Engineering Team, Hosting365
  