System briefings

20 Aug 2007

BTWholesale.com Planned Outage Reminder (Sat 25th - Monday 27th August 2007)

Further to our email to you on 26th July please be advised that BT will be carrying out Planned Works to upgrade BT’s operating systems.  The original outage schedule has been reviewed to minimise impact to customers.  The works will now be carried out between:

22.00hrs Saturday 25th August – 06.00hrs Sunday 26th August (8hr outage including contingency)
and
22.00hrs Sunday 26th August 2007 – 08.00hrs Monday 27th August 2007 (10hr outage including contingency)

During the outage windows, access to www.btwholesale.com and all associated applications will be unavailable, therefore please see the attachment below for alternate methods of access.

BT Wholesale regrets any inconvenience this essential upgrade work may cause our Customers.

For most users of btwholesale.com there will be no action required following the outage, however, please ensure you or your technical contact acknowledges the following:

During the Planned Works, activities will be undertaken to upgrade the www.btwholesale.com portal to support higher levels of availability and service.  As a part of this upgrade the Public DNS records for the platform will be changing to a new IP address.  The following Domains will have their records modified:

www.btwholesale.com
www.btwholesale.co.uk
www.fixedtext.com

To facilitate the change, the following changes will be made to these DNS A-records:

On Saturday 25th August the IP address will be changed from 62.172.198.77 to 62.239.224.3

There is a potential case where customers, who have private (company or ISP) DNS caches which do not obey the Time to Live (TTL) directives, may continue to hold the old IP address. This would be the case until such caches are either flushed or expire and the new IP information is propagated.

Those customers with private caches with their own Time to Live directives should ensure the caches are flushed after the cutover period.

Customers who have hard-coded the IP information of www.btwholesale.com in any of their applications, browsers, search engines or robots will need to ensure that they are updated to reflect the new IP information.

Some Personal Computer Operating Systems have DNS resolver caches (e.g. Windows XP) which may not update the IP address associated with the DNS record – the length of time for entries in the resolver cache depends on settings within the Windows registry. During the above upgrade process we will support both IP addresses.

NOTE: The above upgrade work is subject to successful performance testing.  If any of the tests produce a negative result this work will be suspended.

Please also be aware that BT will be carrying out further Planned Works to upgrade BT’s operating systems in September 2007.  The activities have been planned as follows:

* www.btwholesale.com Service Outage to begin: 22.00hrs Saturday 15th September 2007
* Successful Deployment & Testing: Service Restored to Fault Diagnostics only – 07.00hrs Sunday 16th September 2007
* Successful Deployment & Testing: Service Fully Restored to www.btwholesale.com – 10.00hrs Sunday 16th September 2007
* Deployment & Testing including Contingency: Service Fully Restored to www.btwholesale.com, including Fault Diagnostics – 14.00hrs Sunday 16th September 2007
* Roll Back of Deployment: Service Fully Restored to BTWholesale.com – 22.00hrs Sunday 16th September 2007

Full details of the service impact to all hosted BTWholesale.com applications and Broadband systems will be including in the next briefing.