NWAX Maintenance Notice This Friday @ Midnight (Early Saturday Morning)

[Eric Rosenberry]

NWAX will be upgrading software on the NWAX fabric switches this Friday night at midnight Pacific Time (early Saturday morning 12:01am 3/7/26).

No action is required on the part of the members.  We will be implementing "BGP Culling" whereby we filter the TCP connections for BGP sessions ahead of the maintenance which will cause them to be torn down before we reboot the switchs.  Once we are satisfied the maintenance was successful, we will remove the BGP Culling filters which will allow BGP sessions to restore.

NWAX asks that members not shut down their ports ahead of the maintenance as we want to be able to verify all members are back up after the reboots.  We also ask that you do not "hard down" your BGP sessions as they will not autorecover which creates questions from your peers.  If you would like, you can filter your routes to not export or import any, but this will require you to manually re-enable them after the maintenance, and NWAX will not be able to actively verify traffic is flowing once the maintenance is complete.

We have set the maintenance window to expire at 6am Saturday morning.  It is possible we will need a second window Saturday night (Sunday morning) if we are unable to get through all fifteen devices the first night.

Behind the scenes NWAX has been making many changes which will continue throughout the year.  We are part way through installing 14 new switches, bringing online numerous new dark fiber IRU spans, adding new facilities, and upgrading all the core backbone links to Nx400g.  This code upgrade is largely in support of that.  We ran into some "flow hash polarization" issues that this code upgrade may help resolve (and we needed to do it anyway).

Please reach out if you have any questions!

P.S.  I am pleased to announce that NWAX traffic between several of our sites is now flowing over 400G-ZR+ modules.

-Eric

NWAX Vice President

[Eric Rosenberry]

This maintenance will begin in 20 minutes.

We will send an all-clear once it is complete.

-Eric

NWAX Vice President

503-348-3625

[Eric Rosenberry]

Everything went according to plan.  We upgraded 14 network switches tonight.  No further maintenance windows are planned at this time.

We have removed the BGP Culling and sessions should be restoring now.  We see traffic levels increasing.

Please email n...@nwax.net with any concerns or questions.  We will have folks monitoring the noc inbox in the morning for any lingering issues.

Thank you for being members of NWAX!

-Eric

NWAX Vice President

503-348-3625