Schools Broadband - Anyone else having Internet issues today?

[IrritableTech]

We seem to be back to normal for now NOC has made a change as ive been told (i don't know what to comment at the moment) hope everyone else is now working

 

I had much the same when I rang up, does seem to be running a fair bit more smoothly now. Be interesting to know what has been changed.

[Fazza]

Just airing on the positive side, we have had no issues, we're getting our paid for 200Mbps Up/Down (almost) and have had no filtering issues (we're on 17).

 

I wish we got our full 200Mbps all of the time - apparently even on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays it's due to 'Patch Tuesday' Windows Updates that are being done by other schools/academies! Been like this for nearly two years so getting what we paid for is just a dream for us.

[Primus]

Surely SB should be able to throttle the schools that are hammering their uplinks with Windows Updates to prevent everyone suffering?

 

Traffic management should be able to prevent this from being as bad as it is.

 

Staggering that there must be so many schools not using WSUS or SCCM with WUS!

[Fazza]

Surely SB should be able to throttle the schools that are hammering their uplinks with Windows Updates to prevent everyone suffering?

 

Traffic management should be able to prevent this from being as bad as it is.

 

Staggering that there must be so many schools not using WSUS or SCCM with WUS!

 

They recently added another 10Gbps dedicated link from them to a Microsoft partner company that distributes all their updates which implies that MS traffic goes down those pipes thus freeing up the other pipes for all other Internet useage so no idea why Support keeps blaming Microsoft Updates! I could understand Microsoft Updates being slow if their dedicated pipes are at max and that would be fine, but we thought we'd paid for a 1:1 contention internet connection yet we've been told consistently over the last 12-18 months that it's due to Windows Updates that we aren't doing! Thankfully we'll be moving all our Schools away from a vISP soon so this wont be a problem any more.

[snagrat]

Still very slow for several schools for us. 100 meg lines running at 3.4

 

Update: Now back working as expected

Edited November 20, 2017 by snagrat

[Fazza]

Ours is back to normal too:

 

 

Fed up logging it with them to be told the same Windows Updates thing of other schools doing them and it affecting us.

[Nightshade2k]

I am going over to Netsweeper this week, apparently the new filter platform should work better as Lightspeed apparently causes issues with load balancing during high traffic scenarios hence the issues we all faced and why some schools on certain lightspeed filters were less affected than others, whoever is on seven it would be nice to know whos not using WSUS or alike we can only wait and see i guess what the future holds.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Ours is back to normal too:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]46313[/ATTACH]

 

Fed up logging it with them to be told the same Windows Updates thing of other schools doing them and it affecting us.

 

 

We had a very big DDoS against one of our firewalls today. This was fixed in around 10 minutes. Nothing to do with Windows updates.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

Surely SB should be able to throttle the schools that are hammering their uplinks with Windows Updates to prevent everyone suffering?

 

Traffic management should be able to prevent this from being as bad as it is.

 

Staggering that there must be so many schools not using WSUS or SCCM with WUS!

 

 

 

Yes, despite our best efforts to inform customers to use WSUS many still don't. It's easier said that done rate limiting traffic to windows updates on an ISP scale due to where the traffic actually goes (we find not all goes via our private peering with Akamai all of the time for various reason). We're still working on this though so watch this space.

 

On Tuesday we also saw other large patches from other vendors at roughly the same time which put further pressure on customers Internet connections.

 

Dave

[synaesthesia]

Random suggestion which may or may be of service to your customers, how about providing a hosted WSUS downstream server and direct your schools to use that? Might be a bit chunky as it'd be covering windows 7 through to 10, server 2008 r2 upwards and probably office 2010 upwards but may have less impact than lots of upstream servers in schools hammering Microsoft directly?

[FN-GM]

Yes, despite our best efforts to inform customers to use WSUS many still don't. It's easier said that done rate limiting traffic to windows updates on an ISP scale due to where the traffic actually goes (we find not all goes via our private peering with Akamai all of the time for various reason). We're still working on this though so watch this space.

 

On Tuesday we also saw other large patches from other vendors at roughly the same time which put further pressure on customers Internet connections.

 

Dave

 

Using WSUS or not, it shouldn't be impacting other customers like that.

 

Can you imagine if Virgin Media said that to their customers?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Random suggestion which may or may be of service to your customers, how about providing a hosted WSUS downstream server and direct your schools to use that? Might be a bit chunky as it'd be covering windows 7 through to 10, server 2008 r2 upwards and probably office 2010 upwards but may have less impact than lots of upstream servers in schools hammering Microsoft directly?

 

We have contemplated that but for various reasons it won't really help at the moment. Thanks for the idea though

 

Dave

[Primus]

Using WSUS or not, it shouldn't be impacting other customers like that.

 

Can you imagine if Virgin Media said that to their customers?

 

Totally agree!

[TomHD]

Totally agree!

Me too! That's absurd!

[DGardiner]

if its a contended service then isnt that part of the risk for using cheaper services? its clearly going to be contended with their other users(schools) who will all be hammering it at the same time.

 

if you dont like that then buy a leased line that is uncontended?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Totally agree!

 

Virgin and other ISP's have had issues like that in the past. Just trawl through ISPreview.co.uk

 

The difficult bit isn't actually in the core network, its in the ability to filter tens of gigabits of traffic in a cloud environment in particular when using in-line bridges.

 

Still we've a lot going on behind the scenes at the moment so watch this space.

 

Dave

[synaesthesia]

The leased line isn't contended. The back end however, to a point, is. The core, where it all converges is being hammered, plus with issues like Lightspeed being a further (and bigger) bottleneck, that's where the problems lie in laymans terms.

[FN-GM]

if its a contended service then isnt that part of the risk for using cheaper services? its clearly going to be contended with their other users(schools) who will all be hammering it at the same time.

 

if you dont like that then buy a leased line that is uncontended?

 

These are uncontended lines!

[DGardiner]

These are uncontended lines!

 

Then id be looking through the SLA's and clawing back what you can and if its so often as to be a common thing getting out of that contract as they have failed to provide you with an uncontended service if other users can this easily impact you.

 

 

oversold the service, underinvested the backend.

[Edu-IT]

Then id be looking through the SLA's and clawing back what you can and if its so often as to be a common thing getting out of that contract as they have failed to provide you with an uncontended service if other users can this easily impact you.

 

 

oversold the service, underinvested the backend.

I don’t believe underinvestment is the issue here.

 

It would appear, while not confirmed, that SB have invested heavily in products that now aren’t meeting the needs anymore so are reinvesting in alternative solutions.

 

A company determined not to invest wouldn’t be implementing a new filtering platform and running two at once. Right?

 

Nor would they be buying more links to increase capacity.

Edited November 21, 2017 by Edu-IT

[Primus]

Likewise a competent company would not have allowed this situation to have arisen in the first place!

[FN-GM]

It's not like it's a one off. One of our schools has been having issues for years.

[Fazza]

It's not like it's a one off. One of our schools has been having issues for years.

 

Same here, we even hosted an event for them for local schools where a Fortinet representative came to show all the local schools what they were up to during the next year, he took one look at our configuration and wanted to know who set it up as it wasnt done properly, I pointed out it was SB who were not only in the room at the time but had organised for him to come here - he then went quiet and went through his presentation!

 

We nearly had our config re-done but it's never quite happened as I suspect it's this and not the infrastructure at fault.

[GrumbleDook]

Using WSUS or not, it shouldn't be impacting other customers like that.

 

Can you imagine if Virgin Media said that to their customers?

 

Erm ... that is something Virgin have tried with me over the last year ... they were interesting conversations, including them trying to get me to pay for a premium technical service because I like to run my SuperHub in Modem mode and run my own network ... apparently they don't support that.

[Edu-IT]

It's not like it's a one off. One of our schools has been having issues for years.

That’s very unfortunate.

 

I guess we’ve been lucky.

 

Hopefully whatever changes are happening improve it for your school.

Edited November 22, 2017 by Edu-IT