Downtime per year

[nicholab]

How much downtime do you have per year when installing update on the Forest root?

 

Or does you system keep going even if the forest root fails?

 

In an RM CC3 system your knackered if the forest root fails and to migrate the forest root if takes 2 days down time. 8O

[webman]

We've had one day of unplanned downtime in the past 3 years, and only on our management system due to a harddisk failure.

 

EDIT (reminded by Ben): And an afternoon due to digger going through our power cable.

[plexer]

The only unplanned downtime we've had in the last 3 years has been due to power failure by the leccy company.

 

Ben

[Geoff]

Currently operating at five nines. More through luck than judgment though.

[nicholab]

How do you do you server updates+security? With no down time?

[mrforgetful]

Redundancy / Load Balancing

[localzuk]

We're currently running at 99.974% overall uptime, with our lowest server being 99.769% which is due to us having to test our proxy server whenever the net goes down, to make sure it isn't us. This is since the beginning of January.

 

nicholab - they have all quoted 'unplanned downtime'. Which doesn't include the times the servers have been taken down on purpose.

[mrforgetful]

How do you find these figures out?

[localzuk]

I'm running Nagios which monitors all my servers and services.

[mrforgetful]

Ahh right ok. There's me thinking MS had included a little tool to tell me how good their reliability was

[enjay]

Planned downtime here is very low - when doing updates and such like, I run the install and then schedule the server to restart in the small hours, then I finish it off the next morning.

 

Localised downtime for updates to applications like SIMS or Sage is probably less than 10 hours per year. In the instances where total downtime is required during the working day, this is done during school holidays wherever possible. In the rare event that it must happen during termtime, it is either done at the very end of the day or, if shorter, during the first 15 minutes of the lunchbreak when it is largely just admin staff on the network.

[ArnieJ]

Server downtime has been less than one day in the last 4 years. We've had about 5 days in total without internet access in that time (BT!)

 

We manage planned outages for upgrades or server installations usually during the term breaks.

[ITWombat]

We're currently running at 99.974% overall downtime,

 

Eh??? and you're still employed?

[localzuk]

haha. Maybe I should double check my posts before clicking 'Submit'

[alonebfg]

we have no unplaned downtime until about 1 month ago and since then its not been a happey server but waiting for the new server to come in befor taking it down to fix the issue.

[_Bat_]

Since March last year (my time of employment here) one of my schools has been running at 100% uptime (except for planned downtime obviously) and the other has had half a day downtime due to half the school losing electricity, including the server room. This was when we realised that the UPS hadn't been configured properly and every server immediately lost power . Lesson learnt though... all sorted now. Fortunately no damage was done.

[russdev]

How much downtime do you have per year when installing update on the Forest root?

 

Or does you system keep going even if the forest root fails?

 

In an RM CC3 system your knackered if the forest root fails and to migrate the forest root if takes 2 days down time. 8O

 

Hi

 

This same on most networks if you don't run a BDC and to be honest it is working out pay-off between loading balancing among number of servers or having a backup server.

 

As for downtime very little as updates done out of hours like Nick install then reset at early hours or during holidays.

 

Planned downtime (most was during hols) is about week and a half (one week was due to major upgrades to the network infrastructure).

 

Unplanned we have had about 3- 4 hours at the most.

 

Can I be very honest here and please don't take this wrong way.

 

It sounds like you are having issues with your network and some of them I think are political between you and your network manager and some are procedure issues.

 

But it does sound like you are having some issues and think instead of trying to fix every issue as whole, take each issue and fix it.

 

Then look at changing your network from cc3 if that is what the school wants to do.

 

But word of warning until you have sorted political aspects out you are going to have lots of issues (no matter if you are CC3 or not).

 

I think what I can gather from your situation you need advice from someone removed from school looking at what network set-up is, what could be and how two options will have a benefit or disadvantage on teaching and learning.

 

I will gladly help you anyway I can so please do contact me if you wish get some more advice.

 

Regards

 

Russell

[bossman]

have to do things on the fly so to speak even through the holidays as people (teachers moan if they don't have access to the network)

 

The teachers have a nasty habit of not informing me if they are coming in to the school through the holidays to work with students. This means that everything i have to do is done live and to date i have had only one failed package update. Phewwwwww spent 6 hours straight, at home rectifying this problem so the little darlings could use the network the next day.

[Guest kerrymoralee9280]

Our uptime is fantastic so I believe, but looking to put something on the network that monitors this.... any suggestions??? (Not nagio)

 

As for staff not notifying you bossman I'm sure thats that same anywhere you go. We tell them to get lumped though. We say to staff for instance, we need half a day downtime in the next 8 days at some point...... Tell us when your not planning on using the network, then they cant complain cos you have asked them.

 

Helps having a terminal server though, because that has near 100% uptime so the staff can always work from home if needs be.

[localzuk]

Our uptime is fantastic so I believe, but looking to put something on the network that monitors this.... any suggestions??? (Not nagio)

 

May I ask why not nagios?

 

There are a few programs listed on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_monitoring

[CyberNerd]

If you really don't like nagios for whatever reason, I've been hearing some very good things about Zenoss

http://www.zenoss.com/

[Sylv3r]

As for staff not notifying you bossman I'm sure thats that same anywhere you go. We tell them to get lumped though. We say to staff for instance, we need half a day downtime in the next 8 days at some point...... Tell us when your not planning on using the network, then they cant complain cos you have asked them..

 

Thats what I do hear also, staff are giving the opportunity to tell me when they are planning coming into school, I then pick a day / half day and notify all staff well in advance that the network will be unavilable at that time.

[linuxgirlie]

Probably a couple of days overall in the 3 years I have been here, one was during term time, and was a motherboard failure, server was back up and running within 40 minutes. The other times have been during holiday and planned, for example for server upgrades, which normally take a day for the whole set. (8 servers)

 

The last one was last Saturday, when we had the earthquake, took out all the servers, came in and fixed them(well turned them back on and changed a plug that blew its fuse), so it was fine for Monday

[localzuk]

Haha, I doubt many people in the UK can say they had to fix their servers because of an earthquake!

[linuxgirlie]

Yeah, Don't know if it effected any other schools around the folkstone/dover/deal area.