Categories
Announcements IPv6

Colocation, Hosting Delays, and the Holiday Season

If you’ve been keeping up on our newspipe you’ll know that the long story of delays with Verizon continues. We were informed yesterday (Dec 22.) that the circuit was ready, however it still does not need our basic requirements (IPv4/IPv6 dual stack). This is continuing to impact our ability to expand our colocation, dedicated servers, and hosting options.

As such, we have decided to enact a backup plan and bring in an additional circuit from Sprint so we can get back to business with a predictable timeline. The installation interval should be about 60 days plus we have requested an expedite on the order. As we’ve been a Sprint customer for 5 years and already have existing service with them, we do not expect the same problems that have plagued our attempt at obtaining service with Verizon. Furthermore, we are pleased to report that Sprint’s IPv6 offering is moving to their native network after we’ve been on their test network for the last 4 years. As soon as we have more information from Sprint we will share it here.

Again, we apologize for the delays and problems we’ve faced beyond our control in not meeting our original October/November 2009 opening of the new facility.

As today is December 24 this will be our last post on the newspipe for 2009. We’re going to take it easy for the next week so we can recharge and regroup for what lies ahead. As many of you (and us) are on vacation, holiday, or spending the new year with family and friends, we will be operating on a reduced schedule. Technical support will still be available. See you in 2010!

Categories
Announcements

Push Email Support for Cell Phones

Roller Network is exploring the possibility of adding support for cell phones that can use Microsoft Direct Push (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android) and the BlackBerry. See the following forum thread to express your interest: Push Email Support for Cell Phones

Categories
Announcements Changes

New Version of phpBB for Forums

We’ve been running an old 2.x version of phpBB for some time now. As with any major upgrade, especially one that changes the interface quite drastically, I’m sure this will be a surprise if you’re seeing it for the first time. But the old theme is no longer available, so hopefully everyone will adjust in time.

If you have any problems or questions please let us know. Thanks!

http://forums.rollernet.us

Categories
Announcements Status

Outage Notice Nov. 22, 2009

There was a power outage today at 11:57 UTC-8 caused by this:

DCP_2642

We’re actually about a mile away from it, but as you can see it hit the end of the line, popped the top middle phase, and tripped the whole line we happen to be on. Everything was fine until 14:33 UTC-8 when our new Eaton 9355 installation decided to cut power to the protected load. The alarms it gave were simultaneous “Input AC Over Voltage”, “Utility Fail” followed by “DC Link Over Voltage”. We’re guessing the generator momentarily went outside of tolerance. We’re not clear why that would cause the UPS to shut off (isn’t this the whole point of the UPS?), but it refused to turn back on and kept giving “DC link over voltage”. Because we were offline at this point, we activated the external bypass on the paralleling cabinet to tie the generator directly to the server room distribution and get things back online ASAP. We called the Eaton support hotline and the tech advised us to reset the logic by cycling all the breakers open then closed, however the unit still failed to start citing the “DC link over voltage” alarm. We do have a 24 hour service contract for the unit, so someone is on the way to take a look at it.

[Nov. 23 00:49] Eaton took a look at the unit and was unable to duplicate the problem. The only difference is that it was supplied by utility power and not by generator as we do not wish to experiment without a dummy load and risk an outage. At this time the bypasses have been removed, the generator stopped, and the UPS is back online supplying power to the protected load. We will also have the generator looked at as we suspect the most likely cause of the trouble could be the voltage regulator losing lock or the electronic governor. The units we have are transformerless and the “DC link over voltage” error can be caused by a problem with the neutral reference point going out of bounds.

[Nov. 23 13:00] Our diesel mechanic will be replacing all of the injectors on our generator. One of them had a blown port due to water.

[Nov. 24 10:28] According to the news, the driver of the van dropped something. (Source: KOLO) West Huffaker Lane is 5 lanes wide, four travel and one center turn lane.


View Outage Notice Nov. 22, 2009 in a larger map

Categories
Announcements

Perl API Interface

Keith Wessel has graciously provided a Perl module interface to our control center API. We’ll be posting a download link on the API help page soon, but for now you can get it here: RollernetClient.pm Version 1.0