Welcome to the BE Usergroup Website.

Major Outage

Lots of exchanges down..

2010-03-09 13:51:14, by drsox

Edit: This also seems to be affecting Sky, TalkTalk and Tiscali.. including their phone service on the affected exchanges! Sky report that it is down to a broken fibre run in the area.

Edit 2: Engineers have confirmed the location of the fibre break. Jointers are working on the issue this moment. ETA still unknown, however.

Edit 3: Also affecting JANET services (Ashridge) in the area! No further news though : (

Edit 4: We have the cause: Roadworks damaged an underground cable duct carrying many cables [JANET, LLU, BT, cellphone services etc.] It also looks like BE have decided to have website maintenance overnight too, so no status updates from them :|

Edit 5: Repairs have been going overnight and are still not finished, due to the location of the fault and the respective safety concerns. ETA *still* unknown, sadly.

Edit 6: 13:24 10/03/2010 - Sky offer more information than BE do with the following "Debris stuck in fibre duct, telco are trying to free it.". Still no ETA : ( 24 hours of downtime now.

Edit 7: BE say: "1/7 lines cut [have been] fixed but safety concerns slowing BT progress. Sadly still no ETR."

Edit 8: BT say up to 24 hour resolution time for complete repair, but anytime between then and now there is a chance that some O2/Be lines will come back up during the repair.

Edit 9: Sky are reporting similar but with longer timescale.. "Telco has told us that they expect the outage to be a further 24 - 48 hours and have declared it force majeure*." (*also know as MBORC)

Edit 10: Finally nice to see BE opening up! More information on the broken cables: "these are major SDH trunk cable with extremely high bandwidth so no reroute availability somewhere near Junction 6 of the M1"

Edit 11: 22:30 10/03/2010 - No other news to report other than BE and suppliers are still repairing the damaged cables.

The following exchanges are down:
Luton (SMLT), Leagrave (SMLEA), Hitchin (SMHI), Letchworth (SMLH), Harpenden (SMHR) and Houghton Regis (SMHUR).

Hitchin:




Harpenden:


BE are aware and are working to fix it asap.

Category: Status

IRL

Vote for the next BE Meetup..

2010-03-08 13:22:22, by drsox

BE are planning another meet up in a pub! and they want to know where people would like it this time (Other than London, Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol where the previous ones have been).

Cast your vote over on the BE Forum!

Category: BE Stuff

IRC Quotes

Funny quotes from Be IRC

2010-03-06 17:21:16, by Orbixx

For those of you who haven't yet visited our IRC chat channel yet (why not?!), we have some samplers of the funnier moments we have there at http://www.quotethe.net/quotes.php

If you're unfamiliar with IRC, but want to join and have a chat, just click the "Be Usergroup IRC" link on the site.

Alternatively, if you're familiar with IRC, connect to irc.beusergroup.co.uk:6667 (or 6697 for SSL) and join #Be

The more the merrier!

Category: Usergroup

Improvements

IPv6 Tutorial

2010-02-27 14:31:02, by drsox

If you were wanting to play about with IPv6 and have a spare linux machine or a virtual machine!

Visit http://beusergroup.co.uk/technotes/index.php/IPv6 for details

Hope this works for you lot : ) I just mashed down the instructions that I used.

Category: Usergroup

Progress

Line Bonding customers live!

2010-02-22 19:18:43, by drsox

Not sure why BE didn't fan-fair about this... but...

The first few real (non beta testing) BE Line Bonding customers have gone live!
Speed test posted by a customer on the forum:


Others have also reported receiving the email about progressing their order!
Great stuff guys! Nice to finally see some progress.

Category: BE Stuff

Important BE Notice

Reminder: Old DNS switch off...

2010-02-21 18:27:21, by drsox

FAO / Reminder: Static IP customers.
As with most things at BE, this has been delayed and the old (terrible) DNS servers are still alive.. however they are still due to be turned off.

I have written a tool found here to check which servers you are using and if you need to update your settings (See below).

COPY OF PREVIOUS POST:
Decommissioning of the old BE DNS servers has started (they are being switched off).
87.194.0.51 / cache0.betherenow.co.uk
87.194.0.52 / cache1.betherenow.co.uk
87.194.0.53 / cache2.betherenow.co.uk
If you have not moved to the new DNS servers or alternatives you will lose internet access.

Please ensure that you move to the new DNS servers:
87.194.255.154
87.194.255.155
or alternatives like OpenDNS or GoogleDNS etc.

More information on BE DNS servers can be found on our Wiki.
An automated tool to change the DNS to the latest DNS is here.

Category: Update