topic Re: Service Status reports in Plusnet Feedback

Service Status reports

pierre_pierre — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:46:52 GMT

Just got a great big bundle of reports via RSS Feed - 17 at least up dates including this one

Quote
Service Status RSS Feeds
Email/RSS Service Status Updates (64601) - UPDATE
Other
Posted on: Friday 26 November 2010, 12:01
This is an update to Wednesday's post about the Service Status archive, email subscription service and RSS feed available at http://usertools.plus.net
Service Status updates and Planned Maintenance Posts are still not propagating to the Usertools website. This means that those subscribed to the email or RSS feeds will not be receiving updates.
Until the problem is fixed, we suggest monitoring our main website or the plusnet.service.status newsgroup for Planned Maintenance and Service Status announcements.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Kind regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support

How the heck would we know if you dont put an announcement out as well?

Re: Service Status reports

LiamM — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:57:46 GMT

The problem was that the reskin of the Service Status area broke the way the Usertools script gathers each service status post. It simply scrapes from the Plusnet page so the changes meant it couldn't scrape.
Usertools isn't Plusnet maintained, hence the delay. Colin fixed the issue yesterday so they're now up and running again.

Re: Service Status reports

pierre_pierre — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:01:11 GMT

Stop Worming Liam, they should have put out an announcement to say that the RSS and E-mails feed were broken

Re: Service Status reports

Chris — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:03:22 GMT

An announcement how Pierre? You've just linked to the service status we posted on it, which *was* available at http://status.plus.net

Re: Service Status reports

pierre_pierre — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:11:19 GMT

but I look at the RSS feed and Jelv plus other use the e-mail feed, both were not working

Re: Service Status reports

Oldjim — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:13:00 GMT

Here would have been useful http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/board,2.0.html ;

Re: Service Status reports

jelv — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:29:11 GMT

Quite, there should have been an announcement. I was unaware of the problem until the flood came in via RSS.
I think it is pretty disgusting that Plusnet have not officially taken over the Usertools exchange checker and service status features. Frequently they make posts and announcements (and service status posts) that give links to those tools - if they are going to recommend them to users they should maintain them.

Re: Service Status reports

Steve — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:46:28 GMT

This exact same thing happened to me aswell, And I got to laugh when I saw that report about how the RSS feed was not working, I was completely unaware!!

Re: Service Status reports

Kelly — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:59:23 GMT

Quote from: jelv
I think it is pretty disgusting that Plusnet have not officially taken over the Usertools exchange checker and service status features. Frequently they make posts and announcements (and service status posts) that give links to those tools - if they are going to recommend them to users they should maintain them.

That's a bit harsh. They aren't ours.

Re: Service Status reports

jelv — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:24:19 GMT

It's not harsh at all.Here's some reasons why:

http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2&?helpheader=servicestatus In Useful links it has BT Service Outages

[quote=http://www.plus.net/support/service/network_performance/broadband_packets_drop.shtml]Which pipe am I using?
First you'll need to find the gateway you're connected to, the Usertools Gateway Checker is the easiest way to do this.

[quote=http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/low_cost_areas.shtml#myExchange]3. Which category is your exchange in?
Enter your number in the Plusnet Usertools Exchange Checker.

Frequent service status announcements which link to the gateway checker. E.g. Planned Router Maintenance - Wednesday 24th November 6.00am-6.30am

Quote
Is there anything else I need to know?
You can check which gateway you're connected to by visiting http://usertools.plus.net/@gateway.

If Plusnet are going to officially refer users to tools on the Usertools website they have a duty to make sure that they work and are properly maintained. Rollouts of changes to the portal (like this week) should include testing that they don't break those tools.
Either you take them over or you should remove all reference to them from the portal and stop referring to them in posts made by Plusnet staff on the Community forums or in responses to tickets.

Re: Service Status reports

Kelly — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:13:20 GMT

I don't think I agree really. If the usertools exchange checker wasn't there, we'd probably direct the customer to somewhere like Samknows who also have this data. (or maybe build our own). We provide the service status messages to the portal as part of the service (which was working fine) and the feeds/emails are an addon. It's just nice to be keeping the usergroup in the loop. I don't like the idea of us taking something off our usergroup, just because we think it's good.
Yes we should have been better at keeping the usergroup informed about the changes so there wouldn't have been an outage. We are talking about fixing that process atm.

Re: Service Status reports

jelv — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:29:15 GMT

I'd have hoped you were having that discussion before this weeks events. Don't forget that the exchange checker was broken a couple of weeks back because or rDNS settings on some new gateways.

Re: Service Status reports

Kelly — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:07:11 GMT

They started once we realised we'd messed up

Re: Service Status reports

zubel — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:38:44 GMT

PUG were notified in advance of the changes to Service Status, but due to the unavailability of people who were able to modify the code, it was delayed. In hindsight, it may have been a wiser move to post a SS before the event notifying of possible downtime of the RSS feed and the emails.

Quote from: jelv
I'd have hoped you were having that discussion before this weeks events. Don't forget that the exchange checker was broken a couple of weeks back because or rDNS settings on some new gateways.

Not entirely true. The exchange checker was rewritten to better handle new gateways, based upon parsing their rDNS names rather than a static lookup table. This actually highlighted the issue that some of the existing rDNS entries were not set to a format that the tool could parse correctly, rather than new gateways being set up without the correct rDNS entries at all.
B.

Re: Service Status reports

jelv — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:33:38 GMT

Quote from: Barry
PUG were notified in advance of the changes to Service Status, but due to the unavailability of people who were able to modify the code, it was delayed. In hindsight, it may have been a wiser move to post a SS before the event notifying of possible downtime of the RSS feed and the emails.

No, in hindsight the rollout of the changes to Service Status should have been postponed because when the RSS, and SS emails were tested they failed.

Re: Service Status reports

bobpullen — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:11:50 GMT

Quote from: jelv
No, in hindsight the rollout of the changes to Service Status should have been postponed because when the RSS, and SS emails were tested they failed.

Yes it should, and I specifically asked for the Service Status reskin to be postponed until the email subscription/RSS feed problem was sorted. Unfortunately there was a breakdown in communication and when I challenged the changes the day before the rollout, it was too late as the code that was getting rolled out had already been merged.
We made a mistake, mistakes happen, sorry.

Re: Service Status reports

pierre_pierre — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:40:19 GMT

Thanks for the honesty (at last)