Well it’s that time once again and it’s me as guest editor again. For those of you that don’t know who I am, I’m Chris and I work in the comms team.

We’ve carried on preparations for International Talk Like a Pirate Day , with Pete trying to get people to walk the plank. In honour of this day we’ve even added a pirate type game to our new gaming servers.

First up is the Comms entry for today:-

James ‘ere. Arrrr. Sorry, getting a little ahead of myself there.

Todays been a pretty mentalistic meetingtastic day for the 4 of us, with our attending 16 meetings. For the Mathematically advanced of you, you won’t need me to tell you that that averages out at 4 each for the day!

Amongst that, we’ve still (somehow) managed to continue our forum presence and keeping on top of our problem processes, which included talking about the email problem that we suffered this morning.

Bob’s been doing a good job of avoiding the CS:Source servers over the course of the weekend, so to avoid any further embarrassment and of course we’ve all missed Mand on her day off. We’re going to make sure she goes to loads of meetings tomorrow so that she doesn’t feel left out

Heres today’s update from Ian in Products:-

- All of the normal Monday reporting, and a start of week meeting to talk about how busy we all are.

- Managing a number of hardware problems – the BT warehouse seems to have been sending random items to customers.

- Continuing the build of a new reporting dashboard to provide continuously updated information and statistics to management and the rest of the business.

- Made good progress with a content filtering solution that we hope to trial in the future as an addition to our existing portal controls.

Ian

Colin has provided the Portal team update today:-

Today’s been a fairly ordinary Monday, with the Weekly Start of Week meetings where we sort out what’s going on this week in the various areas. Our “Scrum Team” have given a review of their Manage My Mail tool and the work with the Scrum to senior members of the management team. As per Service Status, this should be rolling out tomorrow, which should mean that, you, the customers should be able to see the changes. Chris has written a blog about this too.

As well as that, we’ve also been doing the mundane, day to day stuff like working on Support Pages, attending meetings about projects and (finally) getting our PAYG Graphs back on line.

Here’s the Development update from Matt:-

Hey. Matt Roberts in QA writing on behalf of the development department.

Today for us has been full of problems (and fixing them) as well as testing our funky new package – released very soon. We’re doing our best to bash bugs and make things work nicely for the customers! Car breakdowns and illness can’t stop us from delivering and we’ve battled through and rolled 4 problem fixes to live as well as testing 17 others on our test platform. All this as well as 3 major projects. Now we just have to correct all the pirate-based spelling mistakes that Pirate Pete and his content team make! Bugspray at the ready, we’ll try to make sure that they’re all dead before it gets out live.

CSC Top 5:-

• Email Issues – Due to the problems we had earlier many people called with authentication issues, also people were changing there passwords thinking they were at fault and having similar problems well into the afternoon.

• New signups – Huge amount of customers calling for assistance with new signups.

• Fault Updates – Many customers today have been calling up for fault updates, I would say that there have been significantly more update calls then fault reporting calls. These, for the most part, are unavoidable.

• Sync/Auth Faults – Usual number of people calling up with new faults.

• Prov updates – Although the amount of problems with prov orders seems to have dropped there are still issues with delayed orders, we need to improve the process for customers checking the status of there orders and also how we inform the customers of issues.

Finance have provided this for us:-

Hi, Mark Bell writing on behalf of the Finance Team.

The team have closed 82 customer tickets today. Myself & James have been working on finishing our month end reconciliations (a bit later than usual due to holidays). Kate has been working on customer DD indemnity claims.

Fiona is organising the contacting of customers who have expired credit cards stored on their PlusNet account.

Bit of a monster from Mike in Networks today:-

Hi, I’m Mike Grice, Senior Systems Engineer at PlusNet.

Ian covered off what he was working on last week, so I’ll give a general overview of what our team does.

The Systems Engineers are Ian Glennon, Josh Berry and myself.

We create medium and lower-level project documentation based on project briefs that are passed to us. This generally covers the design work, architecture and implementation of the system we are building. Depending on the nature of the project we can liase with different departments, generally the Platform Team for larger projects, or Application Development for cross-functional projects.

Once the project documentation has been reviewed and signed off, we begin the first stage implementation. This covers working prototypes, full operational documentation, design documentation, monitoring implementation, and eventual rollout of the service to live.

Once the system is live, it is designated a dedicated owner from the Network Operations team, who then receives a full handover from the Systems Engineer. For large systems, there are then a number of training sessions for the Network Operations team, led by the new Operational Owner of the system, with assistance from the Systems Engineer. Once the training is completed, Network Operations then “own” the platform and are responsible for its day-to-day operation, on-call duties, and so on. You’ve already had posts from some of our NetOps engineers, Adey and Patryk. You’ll hear more from those guys and girls!

Personally, some of the externally visible projects I’ve been involved in recently are the NetApps mail migration (scaling the email backend storage to last us for the next few years), redesign of the Autoturn backup SMTP service, high level design for the new Community site, inital groundwork for a new Authoritative DNS system based on a database backend, design work for the CGI storage migration onto the new NetApp storage in London. I also designed and implemented the systems side of the new Plesk-based hosting system for our Pay As You Host customers, which is a Parbin brand, a company we acquired last year.

One of the other areas we work on is mentoring. We have an excellent Networks Operations team – the work they put in is inspiring to see. Imagine being on-call for over 200,000 broadband customers and you’re some of the way there! We try and help out wherever we can if a fellow engineer needs help, and hopefully we will be developing more formal internal training in the next few months. We act as a ’second line’ to the NetOps oncall engineers, so that they always have a resource on hand if something bad happens.

Finally, we help out with some of the bigger problems. Regardless of where the problem lies – the customer comes first. Everyone will drop what they are doing to help out if a serious problem occurs. It’s important to note that the problem fix is only the tip of the iceberg – often we need procedural updates, monitoring improvements, a workshop to discuss improvement of the platform, and so on.

All in all, Systems Engineering at PlusNet is a diverse and challenging environment. As you’ve probably figured out by now – nothing is static, and its never boring!

Feel free to give me a shout in the forums if you have any questions. I’m a fan of interesting technical challenges, and I’d be happy to discuss most things Internet Systems related.

Until next time,

Gricey.

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This entry was posted by Chris Parr on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.