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| Unrelated picture, for the hell of it |
But we have a couple of customers who are especially demanding, namely my son and his girlfriend.
To be fair, they are guinea pigs, in that they are on a fibre linked via our office router, and one of the final stages of testing a new release of code it to use it ourselves. It is a tad inconvenient for staff, and my son, if there are any issues, but we would rather suffer problems ourselves first.
Unfortunately, by doing in-house testing, using several staff connections, the office, and other sites, we managed to create some unexpected issues and hence the off crash. It is why we test. The result is a loss of routing for 2 to 3 seconds, and loss of phone calls.
So I do apologise if anyone was talking to the office on the couple of occasions today, and I am sure staff will have called back. Sorry.
The problem is that a certain young lady is playing League of Legends, and ranking games, in the middle of the day. Even a couple of seconds downtime can drop her from the game. We've even set up some firewall session logic to try and restore TCP/UDP sessions cleanly, but somehow the outage for a crash is just long enough.
To be fair, if this was any other router, or even a switch, it would not be back in a couple of seconds. It seems very few manufacturers take care over their boot times. FireBricks can do a controlled reboot in a fraction of a second, and we tested that LOL games carry on almost seamlessly if we so a s/w upgrade. Sadly a crash is (deliberately) not as seamless as it ensures a full hardware restart including the Ethernet ports.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I am still keen to test things ourselves before affecting customers. It is the last stage of a lot of testing, but necessary. Well, sort of last. We now have alpha releases that selected FireBrick customers can test, before we issue beta code and then finally a general release. We expect a release soon, maybe at the weekend.
Thinking of gamers, we (A&A) even allow people to pick the window over night where they would prefer to have a PPP restart if we are doing any LNS upgrade work. I know the gamers will be playing at 1am (they are in the bedroom next to mine). So when they finally move out (real soon now, honest) they can have the same reliable Internet that the rest of our customers enjoy, and not be guinea pigs any more.
Sorry...
Jesus H. Christ! - they are moaning about a 2 second drop on their (Gb?) Fibre?
ReplyDeleteThey should come here and fucking rejoice as each packet comes in!
Stop pissing about with the gamers and get us some SatelliteADSL magic going..
Yeah because a 2 second drop causes about 30 seconds worth of loss in a game where the 2 seconds alone can get you killed and lose you a game that's going to take over half an hour to play out!
ReplyDeleteYou should try DOTA2, some games last an hour or more :\ Very frustrating if you get lumped with some bads.
DeleteOK MR. J, now I understand and to show how I am also prepared to take one for the team I am offering to test an AAISP Fiber warts and all.
DeleteJust run it in next week and I will keep you posted on the performance...
To complain about a 2 second drop does seem picky ... On my current ISP, I've had about 5 days of being capped at 128kbps through two tariff change problems, and had my IPv6 /64 accidentally double-booked so my packets were going down someone else's line, and speedtests only ever show about 60% of the FTTC sync speed. Now awaiting a MAC to jump ship to Home::1!
ReplyDeleteIf Mr. J & g/f are paying customers (at market rates I would assume) then of course they can complain about the drops.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, if it is bad enough, they can always go and get a line with another ISP :)