We will be rebooting our border router (br1.cvo2.kattare.net) at midnight 
PST 12/30/2008.  This will cause a brief outage to all Kattare customers.  
The duration should be less than 15 minutes.      

The American Registry of Internet Numbers has announced that they 
will be issuing 4-byte Autonomous System Numbers by default 
starting January 1, 2008.  ASNs are used in the BGP routing core of the 
internet, and have historically been 2-byte values.  For example, 
Kattare's ASN is 32915.  Due to this change, we expect to start seeing 
4-byte ASNs on the Internet very shortly.  In order for our router to be 
able to interpret these values correctly and route to these new ASNs, 
we have to upgrade the software on our main Cisco 12000 series.  We 
will be performing this maintenance at midnight 12/30/2008 
(tonight).

We will be trying a technique of upgrading the software on the 12000 
series that we haven't done before.  Cisco has a method called "Fast 
Software Upgrade" that utilizes the redundancy features in the 12000 
series to reduce the time that the upgrade will take down routing.  I'm 
hoping that we can reduce the outage to well less than a minute using 
this method.  If this method does not work, it will require a full reboot 
of the router, which usually takes around 5 minutes to return to normal 
operation due to the time it takes to reload all of our BGP routes from 
our peers.

Thank you for your patience, and if you have any questions feel free to 
contact support@kattare.com, or me directly.

--mcdermj