Please accept my apologies for the continued problems that we are experiencing on the Broadband network.
Following the original problem, several work streams are underway:
1. A fault was identified that was causing a memory leak on the squids. The short term fix involves regular restarts of the squids (each night) and monitoring of available memory to manually restart when necessary
2. Synetrix is upgrading all of the squid servers and the Netsweeper policy servers to remove the problem. This upgrade is underway, the policy servers have been upgraded, and the squids are being upgraded in a rolling program. It was also determined early on that the communication method between the squids and the policy servers had changed, so it was necessary to retain an old policy server to talk to the old squids, and to deploy the new policy servers to talk to the new squids, adding to the complexity of the upgrade. This is almost complete, we had previously estimated that this would be complete by10th Oct, I am assured that it will be done by Friday 24th Oct.
3. A separate problem was identified with the IWSS AV servers concerning FTP downloads over HTTP. This is being fixed separately.
In addition:
4. We are negotiating with Transform Sandwell to upgrade the incoming ISP bandwidth from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s. We expect this to be in place before the end of the academic year, this service will be shared with SMBC, but should allow a large increase in available inbound/outbound bandwidth.
5. In preparation for this upgrade, we have asked Synetrix to review the firewall configuration. Schools are currently connected through the firewalls using 100Mbit/s NICs on the firewalls themselves, these will be replaced with 1Gbit/s NICs shortly. Otherwise, no point having a 1Gbit/s feed if you can only use 100Mbit/s of it.
6. As well as this, Synetrix will be increasing the number of squids (and IWSSes) to take account of anticipated increase in bandwidth, which will inevitably lead to an increase in demand, so these too must be increased or else they won’t cope.