As part of our rolling programme of network upgrades and replacement of old kit, the following have either happened or are planned to happen soon:

1. The remaining “gigabit” switches in the Forum will be replaced with current models, completing the process of upgrading these switches which was begun last year.  Ports with labels beginning 4/B, 5/B and x/C (for all x in 0..3) may experience a short outage as the old switches are removed and the new ones installed.  We have not yet scheduled this, and as last time we expect the availability of the relevant computing and technical staff to be the tightest constraint.  Email warnings will, of course, be issued nearer the time.
2. At the beginning of January our link to EdLAN via Appleton Tower was upgraded to 10Gbps (previously 2 x 1Gbps).  This link carries the bulk of our external routed traffic, as well as VoIP phones and wireless.  We are now in the process of installing a new primary external router for the Forum, also with a 10Gbps link.  This should alleviate the traffic bottleneck which has affected us several times recently.  (We have a second link to EdLAN via Old College, for resilience and load-sharing.)
3. Both the Forum and Appleton Tower “network services” servers will also shortly be upgraded.  These run our OpenVPN endpoints, as well as providing DNS service for self-managed machines.

For those interested, network documentation with diagrams can be found here.

Network upgrades / Computing Systems by is licensed under a