This work will affect all University wireless services, including eduroam, VisitorNet and ResNet. There will be multiple breaks in wireless availability during this time. We therefore recommend that you avoid using all wireless services during this maintenance period.

Please refer to IT Services News for more information.

If you have questions or concerns about this work please contact the IT Service Desk.

19th October: Recently many wireless users have been experiencing difficulty when trying to connect to the wireless service, or a very slow connection once connected. We are aware that it can be very frustrating when your Internet access is slow or unreliable, and have been trying to determine the cause of these problems and get things running the way they should be as a top priority.

We think we have made a breakthrough this morning (Oct 19th). So if you can not connect, please try going through the set-up one more time. If you can connect, your connection should no longer be terribly slow, as it was.

If you do still have problems trying to connect, or still have a slow connection, please refer to these FAQ articles, and then contact the IT Service Desk (service-desk@bristol.ac.uk):

• FAQ: Slow connection
• FAQ: Can’t connect: Please tell us your MAC address

Please note that we will continue to do some invasive debugging tomorrow morning (Oct 20th 06:00-08:45), as previously advertised. So please don’t try to use the wireless service during this time slot.

Previous updates to this article:

2011-Oct-18 18:00: All wireless services will be unavailable at the times below to allow us to further diagnose the ongoing problems:

• Wednesday 19th October, 06:00-08:45
• Thursday 20th October, 06:00-08:45

2011-Oct-17 13:00: Some users are having difficultly connecting or experiencing a very slow connection. This is under investigation in conjunction with our infrastructure supplier.

• On the Tuesday 6th of September from 8am until mid-day, all wireless services will not be available. This includes Eduroam (at Bristol), VisitorNet and ResNet-Wireless.
• On Tuesday 6th September from 8am until mid-day, Eduroam (for Bristol users visiting elsewhere), the UoB-VPN service, wireless web site and eJournals access test page, will be “at-risk” and may experience short service outages.
• From August 15th to September 7th, all wireless services will be at risk. No service interruptions are expected, however the wireless service will not be resilient during this period. This means there is a much higher likelihood of any unexpected power or other network issues affecting wireless services.

More infomation

• From about 13:15 a very high number of authentication requests started originating from another eduroam participating organisation. These traversed the national/international eduroam server system to Bristol. This abnormally high load, possibly in conjunction with other factors, started to overload the UK national eduroam servers, in a similar way to the problems on Monday. This overload will have affected 1) Bristol staff & Students trying to use eduroam at other organisations, and 2) visitors from other organisations trying to use eduroam at Bristol – users may not have been able to successfully authenticate when trying to connect to eduroam. The UK national eduroam servers are due to be upgraded in future to better cope with high load. The timescale for this is yet to be confirmed.

• From about 14:00, due to unrelated issues that appear to stem from a Domain Controller issue, Bristol Staff & Students may not have been able to login to eduroam, the UoB-VPN service, ResNet wireless, and the Remote Desktop Service. All these issues were resolved before 14:40, with the exception of a minority of ResNet-Wireless users who may have continued to experience problems until 17:00. Further investigations will take place tomorrow to help ensure this problem does not re-occur.

Graph of UK National eduroam server load, showing the abnormally high loads that happened on Monday and today.

• All University wireless services, at all locations within the University will be “at risk” from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. This includes the ResNet Wireless Service. It is likely there will be a couple of five minute long interruptions to service on both Friday afternoon, and Monday morning.
• Wireless services in MVB will not be available whilst the power is off. Wireless in MVB should come back into service automatically after power returns, but some areas may remain out of service until Monday if unforeseen problems occur.
• The ability for Bristol staff and students to connect to eduroam at other organisations should also be considered “at risk”.

Further information may be found on IS News.

At risk: Under normal circumstances services are usually operated using multiple redundant systems. This ensures if any single component fails, the service can continue operating normally (perhaps with slightly degraded performance). A service is considered “at risk” when this operational redundancy is not available (as above, because some equipment must be powered off during the electrical works). A service may also be considered “at risk” when maintenance work is being undertaken that should not affect service, but due to the nature of the work there is an increased risk of something unexpected happening.

The UK national eduroam servers are currently not responding in a timely manner. This may be because they are suffering a higher than normal load.

Updated: 16:00: JANET has been in-touch with the organisations causing the excessive load on the UK national eduroam servers. The load has now been reduced to more normal levels, and there should be no further problems for visiting eduroam users.

National eduroam server status within Europe at 14:47 this afternoon. Live versions of this monitoring image are available on monitor.eduroam.org.

2011-03-17 00:00 All University wireless services will be unavailable until Thursday morning at the earliest. Bristol staff & students using eduroam at whilst visiting another organisation may also be affected by the current problems.

2011-03-17 10:35 The University wired network has now stabilised. An initial attempt at re-enabling wireless services at 10:30 had to be aborted due to residual instabilities in the University’s authentication systems.

2011-03-17 11:20 All wireless services are now available. The wireless system has been hooked up to alternative set of AD servers, and the wireless service has been re-enabled site-wide. If you are continuing to have problems, please check the help pages or contact the IT Help-Desk (help-desk@bristol.ac.uk).

Further information about this incident may be available on IS News.

During the power outage all networking in ASSL and IFAC, including wireless, will be unavailable. More information about this power outage is available on IS News.

Updated 2011-02-06 19:45:

• Power has been restored to NSQI, however a proportion of the network equipment has not been able to recover automatically. It is likely that some networking, including all wireless services, will be unavailable in NSQI until Monday morning.
• The network connection to Burwalls and Hillside-Woodside is now up and running again. All wireless services are available at Burwalls.

Updated 2011-02-07 05:58:

• Power has yet to be restored to the main Physics router. The network in Physics will be isolated from the rest of the campus and the Internet until later on this morning.

Updated 2011-02-07 08:30:

• Some areas of the Physics have come back online, but some areas remain out of action.

Updated 2011-02-07 09:05:

• All wireless locations in Physics are now up and running again.

Updated 2011-02-07 10:00:

• All wireless locations in NSQI are now up and running again.

Refer to the wireless status page for up to the minute notification of any offline wireless access points.

The electricity supplier is investigating – any updates will be posted here when available.

Updated – 2011-01-20, 13:10: Power was restored at about 12:50 and the network in all areas is currently functioning normally, with the exception of The Arts Graduate Centre (7 Woodland Road). This remaining issue is under investigation.

Updated – 2011-01-20, 13:40: The Arts Graduate Centre (7 Woodland Road) network has now been restored.