24 hours of downtime
Yesterday my ISP decided it would be a good time to “upgrade” their network and experience some “routine downtime”. Well, it ended up to be anything but routine.
To give you a little history on this situation, here is an E-mail message that they sent to all customers on Tuesday February 1st at 9:30am.
Dear Adams Broadband Customers,
At Adams Broadband, we never stop making our Internet service better. That tradition and commitment to you continues this month as we upgrade our network infrastructure and adjust our Acceptable Use Policies in order to make
your Internet experience even better.First, we will be making both hardware and software upgrades to our system to accommodate the phenomenal growth in the number of Adams Broadband subscribers and reduce the risk of downtime.
The following changes to our Acceptable Use Policies will also help improve your broadband service:
Beginning February 7th, we will be limiting to four (4) the number of IP devices served by a single cable modem. Beginning February 28th, that number will be further reduced to one (1) IP device per cable modem. Please note that this does NOT affect the number of computers per modem. You will still be able to use multiple computers with your cable modem and router. The change effects only those heavy-use subscribers that use multiple IP addresses. If you fall into that category and currently use a hub or switch, you will need to begin using a router device instead.
Servers will be prohibited. If you operate a web or mail server in your home or office, it will no longer function following the upgrade. You will need to find a web hosting service. That service is available through Adams Broadband at very competitive rates. Call 1-888-222-0077 or 222-6121 for more information on our web hosting services.
Due to this upgrade VPN and static IP accounts will receive a new IP address. Please contact our technical support department for the new IP addresses, after the upgrade is complete.
Thank you for being an Adams Broadband subscriber. We look forward to continuing to serve you.
Adams Broadband Service
Bravo Adams Broadband Service for making a bad thing look good. Personally, this does not effect me too much, since I only purchase 1 static IP Address from them, and I am not hosting any type of Web service directly from home. But I can definitely see a lot of other people being affected.
Ok, so February 7th at midnight, we’ll experience roughly 7 hours of downtime for these “upgrades”. No problem, I can deal with that. Just before the scheduled procedure was to occur, at 4:20pm, all customers received this message:
If tomorrow after our system upgrade you can not connect to the Internet please first try to power cycle all your modem, router (if you have one) and PC (in that order) befroe calling for support. Thank you.
Not quite as well written as the first messages, but again thanks for the heads up. By the way, I left spelling mistakes in these messages, and will not be fixing their errors.
I ended up signing off of the Internet around midnight that night, thinking that I might as well get off before the network goes down. In the morning, I woke up to see that the service was functioning properly. Well done Adams’ technical staff on an upgrade well done.
But wait, the saga continues… All customers receive another message, on February 7th at 2:30pm, stating:
We are going to complete our system upgrade this evening, there will be outages between 12:00 midnight Tuesday February 8th and 7:00AM Wednesday Feruary 9th.
Oh?! So the upgrade was not completed successfully. Oh well, another night without Internet service, no big deal. Something that this “literary scholar” failed to realize is that midnight is the start of the new day, not of the previous day. But oh well, we can’t call be Gregorian wiz-kids like myself. Again, the spelling mistakes remain.
So, at around 12:30am on Wednesday February 9th 2005, the service went down. At 8:30am, I awoke to a still nonfunctional Internet service. No big deal, they are probably running overtime, I’ll make some coffee. Well, it ended up not coming back online until 12:37am on Thursday. That’s right, 24 hours of “scheduled maintenance/upgrade downtime”. Anyone that has ever worked for an ISP before will tell you, that is utterly horrific. That will, and indeed did, cost you many customers. Not only will you not sign up new accounts for that time span, but many previously loyal customers will cancel their service. Almost no doubt about it.
A blessing in disguise
So, I’m back up and online. Yipee! Well, what did I do for my downtime? The downtime ended up being bittersweet because I got many things done on my system that I would have, almost certainly, never done otherwise.
I decided it was high-time I learn a few of my applications that I have installed, and used scarcely, but have never really gotten “under-the-hood” with yet. This was really fun, since I’m sure my productivity will rise as a result.
I also took the opportunity to do some maintenance on my machine, which is something I should do a little more of. Here is a short laundry list of the things I was able to accomplish during my downtime.
- iTunes stuff
- Delete all duplicate songs in iTunes (around 250 duplicates)
- Delete music that I never listen to (around 1,200 songs)
- Clean up duplicate artists, and albums
- Cleaned up nearly all ID3 tags
- Backup
- Burned CD of all my work
- Backed up entire music library (DVD)
- Backed up entire photo library (DVD)
- Backed up address book and email
- Trashed
- Trashed apps I don’t use
- Trashed 8 year old databases!
- Trashed tons of ancient documentation
- Trashed countless worthless files
- Learned Kung-Foo
Well you can scratch that last one, but you get the idea. I got a lot accomplished when otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been as thorough. This is something I really need to keep up with, and plan on creating some type of schedule for my personal stuff. I backup all my stuff for work online, on a computer, an on CD pretty regularly, but not my personal stuff.
What do you do with unexpected Internet downtime?
Related sites
Recent features
Leah Andreone - Break Your Fall
Coheed and Cambria - The Velorium Camper II: Backend Of Forever
The Format - Give It Up
Song of the week
Sara Bareilles - Between the Lines
Sara Bareilles' "Between the Lines" is the Song of the Week for April 20 to 26.
Warning: main(images/faq.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/.eastwood/cdevroe/theubergeeks.net/wp-content/themes/clockworkorange/sidebar.php on line 119
Warning: main(images/faq.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/.eastwood/cdevroe/theubergeeks.net/wp-content/themes/clockworkorange/sidebar.php on line 119
Warning: main() [function.include]: Failed opening 'images/faq.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/.eastwood/cdevroe/theubergeeks.net/wp-content/themes/clockworkorange/sidebar.php on line 119