Network outage due to burst pipe Monday 17th April 2023 10:05:00

Work is being done on the power supply today and over the next few days to get this back into normal operation. This may cause failures in the Selfnet LAN. However, as stated, the WLAN is still protected by batteries and should therefore not fail.

The LAN in the entire building has been running again in the described emergency mode since yesterday evening.

We have since been informed that conditions in the equipment bay are again adequate to run more equipment there. We will therefore also try to install the devices for the LAN supply of floors 1-4 again as soon as possible.

However, we have also been informed of further power outages in the coming weeks/months for a complete repair of the fuse cabinets. For the time being, we will therefore continue to buffer our WLAN systems via batteries and thus hopefully enable a high availability of the WLAN. The devices we install for the LAN will not be connected to the batteries to increase the runtime. If there are further power failures, it cannot be ruled out that the devices that provide the LAN connection will lose their configuration and we will have to set them up again manually. This may take several days. The restoration of the LAN connection is therefore explicitly only an emergency solution with reduced availability. Members should not expect that the LAN will work for the next months without failures (even of several days). That's why we continue to use our WLAN with the batteries to provide at least a basic supply as failure-free as possible.

As announced, we put the batteries on the WLAN infrastructure into operation this evening. Unfortunately, the runtime is somewhat worse than expected. However, we can still bridge about 6 hours of power outage. On the ground floor even a little longer. We hope that this will provide a good coverage of the WLAN in the next few days.

We have been informed that our power supply may be down more frequently over the next few days due to repairs to the general electrical system. We would like to try that the residents get as little restrictions from the WLAN as possible. Therefore, we have procured rechargeable batteries that can probably run our technology for a few hours without a power supply. We will try to install these batteries tonight. This will lead to small outages of about 20 minutes. After that we hope to be able to absorb power outages of about 7 hours. We will leave the batteries installed for the period of the construction work.

Major power outages are expected to occur again in Building A over the next few days as the power supply is brought back on line in a reasonable manner. Since all our technology is in Building A, power outages there will also lead to outages of the transition WLAN throughout the building. If we find out more details about the times, we will inform you. We are trying to prevent the WLAN from being down for several days at a time due to the repairs to the power.

Today, at about 11 a.m., we were also able to temporarily supply power to the equipment on the first floor. Thus, the first floor as the last floor should now also have the basic supply with Selfnet WLAN

In the meantime, we have learned that our information about the ground floor is unfortunately not entirely correct. We are still missing the power there. That's why there is no LAN there yet. The WLAN is also not so good there yet. We hope that we will get power there again as soon as possible and can put the device into operation.

We dried our technical cabinets with the help of 9 Selfnet members over a few hours last night. Afterwards, we covered the cabinets with waterproof tarpaulins and equipped them with dehumidifiers. This made it possible for us to put the Selfnet WLAN back into operation with new switches almost everywhere during the night.

For temperature reasons, we do not want to operate any more devices under the tarpaulins. For the floors 1-4 there will be only one W-LAN connection for the time being. With the provision of the LAN connection we will wait until the shaft in which the water damage occurred has been dried by the building owner and the humidity has been reduced. After that, we will be able to dismantle our enclosures and reinstall all the equipment.

On the other floors, things are currently looking good. Everything should work there again. However, due to the still wet building cabling, we cannot rule out the possibility of power being taken away from us here again, which could lead to further outages.

After some of us cleaned and dried the cabinets this evening the wireless connection should be working now from first floor and up. Ground floor and wired connections will be available after the electrician cleared us to proceed.

As several of our network cabinets are impacted by the water and the resulting flooding disabled the electric cabinets for half of the building we are unable to resume service for several floors. Currently floors 5 and 6 should be working (wired and wireless) and ground floor/first floor are not affected by the burst pipe but only by the missing electricity. Those could be back in service this evening (wired and wireless).

For floors 1 through 4 we propably can establish a "emergency mode" in so far as we plan to bring the wifi accesspoints back only. Those floors will be wifi only until the electrician clears us to proceed with the rest.