KINBER engineering and operations conduct the many technical functions required to maintain and manage the optical (Layer 1), ethernet (Layer 2), and routing (Layer 3) components of the PennREN network. Our network engineers diagnose and resolve network problems, perform equipment refresh, replacement, and upgrade, decommission retired equipment, handle tasks in support of circuit installations, service upgrades, and backbone upgrades, respond to abuse complaints, and coordinate and communicate third party maintenance and repair activities.

Meet the Operations Team

Roman Nekrasov, Network Administrator
Ben Miller, Director of Engineering and Operations

PennREN Technical user Group (PTUG) Previous Meetings

April 2, 2019 (in-person meeting at KINBERCON 2019) [no slides]
February 13, 2019 10:00 am [slides]
April 24, 2018 8:00 am (in-person meeting at KINBERCON 2018) [slides]
February 27, 2018 9:00 am ET [slides]
October 30, 2017 10:00 am ET [slides]
September 20, 2017 10:30 am ET [slides]
July 11, 2017 1:30 – 2:30 pm ET [slides]
May 24, 2017 9:30 – 10:30 am ET [slides]
April 4, 2017 3:45 – 4:15 pm ET [no slides]

Operations Announcements

March 2, 2018
A nor’easter is approaching the Eastern seaboard that has the potential to affect the PennREN service area over the coming days. This alert is to notify you of the measures KINBER is taking to prepare for this weather event. KINBER is taking all appropriate actions to prepare for this storm. KINBER is working with our affected providers to track and monitor the storm and its potential impact on service to our customers. The KINBER team will continue to watch the path of the storm and monitor its effect on our service area. The KINBER PennREN NOC will remain active 24 hours a day, seven days a week ready to address any potential issues or additional impact to customers as a result of this storm. If needed, contact the PennREN NOC phone number directly at 317-274-3213 or report a problem online.

November 22, 2017

KINBER’s PennREN Engineering completed major maintenance work to move the PennREN Philadelphia Point of Presence (POP) at 401 North Broad Street from the previous space in Suite 250 to the Netrality Suite in the new KINBER Research and Education Network cage. As previously announced, all Unprotected Circuits, Static Route, and NAT only customers connected directly to this POP were offline from about 11:00pm Sunday, November 19th, 2017 until 6:00am on Monday, November 21st, 2017.

November 7, 2017
KINBER is announcing a major maintenance window to facilitate our Point of Presence (POP) move at 401 North Broad Street (NBRD) from our current space in Suite 250 to the Netrality Suite in the Research and Education cage that KINBER has built. 

May 2, 2017
At 8:18pm EDT on Monday, May 1st, 2017, the severe storms moving across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania caused a non-service impacting outage as fiber was damaged by falling trees taking out our Network Backbone between Penn State University Park and Bucknell University. All traffic re-routed as expected during this outage.

However, at 12:20am EDT on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017, the storms caused an additional outage between Windstream Communications and Shippensburg University that Segmented the Network between the West and Central Ring and the East Ring. This additional incident caused traffic issues for multiple customers including a loss of connectivity to our KINBER Member Exchange Route Reflectors in the Central Ring, a loss of BGP to routers on the opposite side of the state, and Internet Traffic Issues as PennREN owned routes, that are also used by multiple customers and caching resources, continued to be advertised out routers in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The fiber between Windstream Communications and Shippensburg University was severely burned, but restored at approximately 9:20am EDT on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017 restoring the PennREN Network to a single network. While the original outage segment is still experiencing an outage as of this notice, services are operating as expected.

While a rare occurrence to lose two fiber segments separating the network in two, this is a concern for KINBER. To alleviate the potential for this to occur in the future, we are investigating technical solutions to close the gap between our Egress Routers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia through a diverse circuit. We apologize for the outage and inconvenience with what we recognize is a critical time for most KINBER customers at the end of a semester.