Our internet service upgrade – scheduled for last night – has been delayed until next week after we encountered an unexpected problem.  We do not have a specific date/time for the next upgrade window, but I’ll post that here as soon as we’ve completed a conference call with the involved parties. 

What happened?

At 5:00 PM, ICCSD network administrators, working with Iowa Communications Network (ICN) and Lightedge Solutions engineers, switched our internet connection from our current 1Gb ICN connection to the new 3Gb ICN connection.  A component of this switch also includes moving from our current internally-managed Palo Alto firewall to a Lightedge-managed Fortinet firewall; staying on our existing Palo Alto hardware is not an option, as it cannot handle the 3Gb throughput required for the new connection. 

The internet connection worked properly, as did all but one of the mission critical services that we had previously identified as potential points of failure during the internet service upgrade.  One service, however – a VPN tunnel to a particular site – was not successfully brought online after implementation of the new firewall.  We attempted troubleshooting until the close of our announced upgrade window, but with no success were forced to revert to the previous settings and service.  

What should I expect moving forward?

As previously mentioned, we’ll be rescheduling the upgrade window as soon as possible, likely for next week.  We’ve already identified the steps necessary to solve the issue with the site that didn’t come up, and now need to coordinate availability on the part of ICN and Lightedge.  I’ll post a specific date/time as soon as we have one. 

Since the upgrade was not successful, I expect that internet performance issues will continue for the coming (approximately) week.  Our network administrators have been tuning quality-of-service settings over the past couple of weeks in order to prioritize critical or interruption-intolerant traffic, and will continue to do so in order to make the most of the 1Gb service we currently have.  

As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, we expect all internet performance problems to be immediately resolved following the successful upgrade to 3Gb service.  We appreciate your patience as we work through this process.