Patchtime managament 2021 Region America and APAC

Dear customer,

year 2020 is ending and we want to wish you a happy new year 2021!

We also want to inform you about some changes in our regular security patching which needs to be done as there are many systems in many time zones meanwhile.

In order to give each system the attention which it may need after patching we will patch by region on different days.

Europe Region: we will keep the current patching, means

    • QA systems will be patched on Thursday after 2nd Tuesday each month
    • Production systems will be patched on Friday after 2nd Tuesday each month

America Region:

    • QA: On the 3rd Tuesday of each month
    • Production: The 3rd Tuesday to Wednesday night of each month

APAC Region:

    • QA: On Thursday after each 3. Tuesday of the month
    • Production: The Thursday to Friday night after each 3. Tuesday of the month

As usual patching of production systems will take place in the first hours of the day, e.g. “Friday” usually means from Friday 0 am to 5 am within the respective time zone. Patching of Development systems take place at 10 AM, QA / Stage systems take place at 2 PM.

We will send upfront notifications with exact dates as usual, however per region in future. If you have systems in several regions then you will receive several notifications.The dates for patching in Europe will stay the same as before.

We reserve the right to move patch dates, e.g. due to national holidays or later availability of upstream patches,

All the best
Your MCON Managed Services Team

Patch Day December 2020 – System Upgrades MCON Managed Services

Dear Sir or Madam,

according to our announcement below the patches were successfully done. All systems are up and running. However if you encounter any problem please contact service@mcon-group.support.

We sucessfully migrated the IPv4 routing to the new Lumen connection, the IPv6 connection is still on the old line and will be migrated in the next days, there should be no noticeable downtime and only a very minor part of the traffic is IPv6, we will carry out this work without further notification.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Services Team

Announcement from 3th December 2020:

In order to keep our server systems updated and secure, we need to apply patches on a regular basis.

The next patch day is scheduled for Thursday, December 10th 2020 at 11 pm till Friday, December 11th 04 am*.

The patches for the development and QA systems are applied one day earlier on Thursday, December 10th 2020, development starting at 09 am and QA starting at 10 pm. The purpose of this gap is to be able to recognize problems that could be introduced by software patching before the production systems are patched.

There may be short downtimes during service, or when the operating system restarts.

In addition to the regular patching the external firewall in DC3HAM will be exchanged, this means new hardware and new software.
The new firewall incorporates a different Intrusion Prevention Engine but due to the fact it uses identical rules, we do not expect any false positives.
Should you experience that requests are being blocked, please write a ticket explaining exactly what happened and how to test it to service@mcon-group.support.
In very urgent cases please call us on the phone number mentioned in your contract.

Best regards

Your MCON Managed Services Team

* The times are valid for the respective timezone

Success: DC3HAM Network Maintenance on 3rd-4th December 2020

Dear Sir or Madam,

according to our announcement below the maintenance was successfully done. All systems are up and running. However if you encounter any problem please contact service@mcon-group.support.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Services Team

Announcement from 25th November 2020:

Dear Sir or Madam,

please be informed about the following maintenance on our network devices in the Datacenter DC3HAM.

The maintenance is scheduled for :
2020-12-03 from 23:00 till 2020-12-04 04:00 CET (Central European Time)

There will be 3-4 very short interruptions in the network connectivity, each of them most likely in the area below 30 seconds.

This maintenance is a preparation of carrying out the switch of Century Links/Lumens internet connection to us in an orderly way after the 4 failed attempts by Centry Link/Lumen.
The actual cutover has to be carried out at another day.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Service Team

Success: Patch Day November 2020 – System Upgrades MCON Managed Services

Dear Sir or Madam,

according to our announcement below the patches were successfully done. All systems are up and running. However if you encounter any problem please contact service@mcon-group.support.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Services Team

Announcement from 5th November 2020:

Dear Sir or Madam,

In order to keep our server systems updated and secure, we need to apply patches on a regular basis.

The next patch day is scheduled for Friday, November 13th 2020 between 0:00 am and 4:00 am*.

The patches for the development and QA systems are applied one day earlier on Thursday, November 12th 2020, development starting at 10 am and QA starting at 12 pm. The purpose of this gap is to be able to recognize problems that could be introduced by software patching before the production systems are patched.

There may be short downtimes during service, or when the operating system restarts.

Best regards

Your MCON Managed Services Team

* The times are valid for the respective timezone

Patch Day November 2020 – System Upgrades MCON Managed Services

Dear Sir or Madam,

In order to keep our server systems updated and secure, we need to apply patches on a regular basis.

The next patch day is scheduled for Friday, November 13th 2020 between 0:00 am and 4:00 am*.

The patches for the development and QA systems are applied one day earlier on Thursday, November 12th 2020, development starting at 10 am and QA starting at 12 pm. The purpose of this gap is to be able to recognize problems that could be introduced by software patching before the production systems are patched.

There may be short downtimes during service, or when the operating system restarts.

Best regards

Your MCON Managed Services Team

* The times are valid for the respective timezone

DC3HAM Maintenance at 27th October 2020 by Lumen

Dear Sir or Madam,

please be informed about the following  scheduled network maintenance by our carrier Lumen (former CenturyLink) in the Datacenter DC3HAM.

Lumen intends to carry out internal maintenance within its network. This has been designated as ESSENTIAL. The nature of this work is to perform traffic affecting work in order to rectify a fault. The maitenance is carried out on a longhaul fibre connection, which is not local to the datacenter, this might still result in short outages during the maintenance window specified below.

Lumen would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by this maintenance.

The maintenance is scheduled for :
2020-10-27 from 00:00 till 06:00 CET (Central European Time)

We will be in the Datacenter and test the systems after the maintenance window and inform you about the status.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Service Team

Success: Patch Day October– System Upgrades MCON Managed Services

Dear Sir or Madam,

according to our announcement below the patches were successfully done. All systems are up and running. However if you encounter any problem please contact service@mcon-group.support.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Services Team

Announcement from 8th October 2020:

Dear Sir or Madam,

In order to keep our server systems updated and secure, we need to apply patches on a regular basis.

The next patch day is scheduled for Friday, October 16th 2020 between 0:00 am and 4:00 am*.

The patches for the development and QA systems are applied one day earlier on Thursday, October 15th 2020, development starting at 10 am and QA starting at 12 pm. The purpose of this gap is to be able to recognize problems that could be introduced by software patching before the production systems are patched.

There may be short downtimes during service, or when the operating system restarts.

Best regards

Your MCON Managed Services Team

Stopped: DC3HAM Network Maintenance at 8th October 2020 by Lumen, formerly CenturyLink

Dear Sir or Madam,

Unfortunately Lumen (formerly Century Link) was not able to complete and enable the new connection to our environment announced below. We stopped all tests with them and had them revert the connection after 30 minutes of downtime.

We will continue the discussion with Lumen next week, and MCON will push towards a direction where the new connection is built completely in parallel and a rerouting of the traffic will only be done after the interconnect between Lumen and MCON is verified and working.

Announcement from 2nd October 2020:

Dear Sir or Madam,

please be informed about the following  scheduled network maintenance in the Datacenter DC3HAM.

On 08.10.2020 at 23:00 GMT we will be carrying out network maintenance in our Colocation DC3HAM, our Provider Lumen (formerly Century Link) will move our connection over to a new core Router system since the old core system needs to be removed.
This time Lumen investigated the LACP issue that was happening before and tested the setup, they estimate a probability of 99,9% that the switch will work without a problem.

MCON enforced a procedure where no further tests will be carried out in that night, but instead if the new connection does not work right away, we will revert to the old setting.

In case of another unsuccessful cutover by Lumen, we are enforcing a complete new build of the network connection in parallel to the existing infrastructure to avoid any further interruptions of the operations.

Best regards
Your MCON Managed Service Team

Patch Day October 2020 – System Upgrades MCON Managed Services

Dear Sir or Madam,

In order to keep our server systems updated and secure, we need to apply patches on a regular basis.

The next patch day is scheduled for Friday, October 16th 2020 between 0:00 am and 4:00 am*.

The patches for the development and QA systems are applied one day earlier on Thursday, October 15th 2020, development starting at 10 am and QA starting at 12 pm. The purpose of this gap is to be able to recognize problems that could be introduced by software patching before the production systems are patched.

There may be short downtimes during service, or when the operating system restarts.

Best regards

Your MCON Managed Services Team

* The times are valid for the respective timezone