schoolsbroadband.co.uk

[Ashm]

I assume you mean the slow connectivity?

I think he means lack of any connectivity... If we hadn't already migrated over to our new provider we'd have been in the same situation.

[synaesthesia]

Indeed. Back up now but 12 hours of downtime isn't particularly good. We're moving to School's Broadband Line is physically in place, just waiting for the routers and stuff now

Strikes me as not particularly good service from a company "testing" a migration live and watching it cock up in such a large way. I realise with timing it may have cut things close but perhaps they should have done that at half term, but of course there may be other reasons for it. To be fair it's one (very large) blemish on connectivity reliability and stability so can't shout too much.

I do however have to question service times, even though neither my own school or the primaries I look after are staying with EMBC. OK they won't have such a large service team but having to prioritise workloads in such a way that it could take days for an MX record change - something that can be done in a couple of minutes (and is done in a couple of minutes, whilst on the phone to any other provider (although granted if that provider is Virgin, it'll take 2 hours to find someone who knows what the Internet is, and another hour to find one that knows what an MX record is)).

But that's all inner workings of something we don't fully understand. Hey-ho.

 

*disclaimer - this is the opinion of me, not my school or my professional undertaking as a technician yadda yadda yadda

[GrumbleDook]

A general comment to raise a few things to clear some possible misconceptions about how SLAs work, and this applies across many, many providers of a range of services.

 

1 - SLAs in this particular contract are those agreed by embc, the LAs and the providers. Service Changes are a lower priority to service faults. They are set as such within the SLAs and depending on other work can be done pretty quickly or take the fully specified time within the SLA. This is nothing new to most people.

 

2 - When people complain about it taking ages for something to be done (in this case DNS) please check that a) you have checked it is has actually been done and it is not just a case that *you* haven't been informed as another named contact (ie the one specified on the call) might have all the info and just not passed it on yet because *they* are up to their necks with things in the school or b) the thing you want changing actually sits with that provider and not someone else. E.G. There is no point asking for a zonefile or an entry change for a domain where the NS is already moved away from the ISP, in the same way there is no point asking to register a domain already belonging to someone else.

 

Good documentation within your school will help deal with some of the above problems (eg what services are where) and with all the changes that are going on I would strongly recommend that you update your own in-house documentation and not 100% rely on that held by your service providers. It is your responsibility to do this ... if there are discrepancies between the information in the documentation then you find the right info and make sure both records (yours and the service provider's) is updated accordingly.

 

Try to make sure that you are clear with the different SPs about which services sit where ... there is nothing worse that spending ages trying to work out why a service you have been told by your client should be with you when you can find no order record, nothing in your CMDB and they are adamant it is ... only to find that someone else does it.

 

DNS is a key area here ... with Mail being in one place (e.g. Office 365 / Google Apps), Web hosting in another (CSNewMedia, FarceHosts, etc), remote access to the school covered by yourselves ... and DNS by yet another provider (who may not even be your ISP.

 

I know that this, for some, will be about introducing an ageing female relative to an ovum vacuum endeavour (I'm sure I've used that joke before!!!) but it still worries me with things I am seeing going wrong or with the potential to go wrong the first few days in November ... and mainly down to people not thinking about what they are doing. This is not limited to broadband and swapping services, but covers a lot of areas within schools ...

Edited October 8, 2012 by GrumbleDook
edited to show that this covers a range of examples that have happened with a wide variety of schools.

[synaesthesia]

Grumbledook, I'd much rather this was discussed via email directly with me. I'd much rather own up to my own mistake than having a 3rd party berate me for it but didn't get a chance to do so.

Thread is already derailed as it is. Can't argue over the importance of communication but the big beef raised here was the connectivity issues last week. I made my opinion known that "up to" (important speech marking there) 5 day priority on a small job wasn't particularly impressive, it doesn't need comeback. (aware of many 2 minutes becomes 1 large job etc) The consequence of a small mistake is down to me and that particular school only and at no point has that particular issue been brought up on Edugeek or otherwise publicly.

[Edu-IT]

Another solution is to move your domain to somewhere like CS New Media, where you don't then have to rely on EMBC (or any other provider) to make the changes. You can login, do it yourself, and boom.

 

And oh, you lost connectivity? We at least had some.

[SYNACK]

Another solution is to move your domain to somewhere like CS New Media, where you don't then have to rely on EMBC (or any other provider) to make the changes. You can login, do it yourself, and boom.

 

And oh, you lost connectivity? We at least had some.

 

Yea, getting services 'unmanaged' is usually the fist thing to do for a responsive network, at least here. If they manage it then you are subject to their - the management companies - flimsy promises, sliding timescales and nooses or red tape. The MoE here is trying to make their own little walled garden which will force management onto its subscribers who will have to subscribe to get to the content. My main issue is that usually managed services, in all of my experience are slow, rubbish, restrictive and expensive while providing very little benefit to anyone who can identify and use a patch lead all by themselves.

 

You do need to keep track of all the suppliers and logons though which is the sole disadvantage. The last thing I want is some dropkick from the MoE forcing me to run 2022 devices in a subnet or putting 50 schools in the same broadcast domain because they can't figure out the basics of routing themselves let alone cope with schools using internal routing that they can summarise.

 

management = mediocrity at best as it is generally a lowest common denominator system.

Edited October 8, 2012 by SYNACK

[synaesthesia]

It's worth noting that with at least 2 providers I know (M247, Talk Straight) you get full management of your domain. The respective companies will be more than happy to help with changes that need making but obviously the option is there.

 

Naturally when making any changes a full changelog should be kept and config backups also kept to hand and updated. But that's common sense.

[synaesthesia]

And oh, you lost connectivity? We at least had some.

 

Yup, entirely. Lovely day in the office, it was unusually quiet and very productive!

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi Synaesthesia,

 

a little bird told me your new leased line from us today went live but you were ill so couldn't see it in action on its first day?!

[Edu-IT]

Hi Synaesthesia,

 

a little bird told me your new leased line from us today went live but you were ill so couldn't see it in action on its first day?!

What are you using to filter your new connection, just out of interest?

[synaesthesia]

True Sat at home all day. A little time with the kids but when too ill to move it's not very nice

 

I still couldn't resist a play from home - at least I could do some VPN testing, mail performance tests etc from here

@Edu-IT - Fortigate - a 100D box. My previous experience of the smaller Fortigate stuff in my primaries has been good for web filtering so no reason to believe this will be any different. We've one concern over the email filtering though (don't know if this was raised with Dan @ SB yesterday) but we'll be looking into that in due course (basically we can't seem to find a way for senders and recipients to be notified their email has been filtered/blocked or held in a quarantine). Hoping we don't have to get another product in for that.

[SchoolsBroadband]

I'm not sure if that can be done or not. Dan is in Loughborough and then Northamptonshire on Friday so I'll get one of my other techs to look into it for you.

 

Any more feedback is greatly appreciated