From the Office of Information Technology:
On Sunday, March 11th, from 6 a.m. - 6 p.m., the Office of Information Technology will be performing a reconfiguration of the University's GIGaPop and Network border complex. This is where all commercial Internet access, Research Network access, and institutional network peering accesses the University network system. Basically it houses the University's connections to and from the outside world.
We do not expect any service interruption. However, while we have planned this work to be non-service impacting, we do also acknowledge that issues can arise and failures can occur. Because of the sensitive nature of this work, we want you to be informed. We believe we have mitigated service impacting issues for all known scenarios. We are also adding additional staff support to ensure there is adequate coverage for communications, should it be needed.
Technical Details
OIT network Engineers have been working for several months to streamline and re-organized the GIGaPop/ Border complex, as Border Gateway Protocol routing is becoming more complex and routing tables too large to manage.
Specifically we are moving the internet commercial route-table into a virtual routing and forwarding table, implementing a redesign of the entire campus border complex. This work is being performed to streamline and simplify the configuration, further prepare us for IPv6, and provide improved peering capability with the State and other partners.
This change was attempted October 30th, 2011. During that change, a configuration table on one of the routers overloaded and became unstable. When that happened, the University was isolated from the Internet for approximately 2 hours while network engineers analyzed the failure and backed out the change. We have been in contact with the vendor to ensure this does not happen again and we have adjusted the plan to incorporate an additional router to help during the transition and provide us a more seamless service transition. In the end we expect to have a simpler and more robust GIGaPop for the University.
Since the work is specific to the Network GIGaPop, it should have no service implications to University internal network traffic or internal data center network traffic--only network traffic bound for outside our Network borders. Please note that this change is pending approval by the OIT Change Approval Board.
Timeline
- March 11, 4:00am - Begin the migrations
- March 11, 10:00am - Completion of the intended changes
- March 11, 12:00(noon) - Validation and cleanup
- March 11, 04:00 pm - Time reserved for back outs of and service mitigation.
