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Policies
- MEC Mailing List Submissions (i.e., MEC-tech, MECnet listservs)
The following guidelines apply to any posting that is submitted to MEC mailing lists (i.e., MEC-tech, MECnet listservs).
- Purpose of Listserv -- The MECnet and MEC-tech mailing lists, owned by Merrimack Education Center, were established to provide the MECnet community with a forum for communicating with their colleagues in such areas as process or procedural questions, technical issues, product or service recommendations, etc. As owners of these mailing lists, MECnet reserves the right to moderate the submissions before any action is taken. We have the option of approving or rejecting the submissions; if an article is rejected, we will inform the sender of the reason why it was not approved.
- Content of Email Submission -- The content of the posting must be professional and appropriate for the target audience. Derogatory remarks against others (whether they are colleagues, people within a school district or municipality, or otherwise) are not acceptable. Subscribers are expected to exercise both common sense and courtesy in the messages they transmit over the listserv. Postings that contain disparaging comments about vendors or other service providers will not be approved; however, if a member experiences issues with a particular product or vendor, a simple statement to that effect would suffice.
- Do not use our listserv for conducting any private business or commercial activity without advance written permission from MECnet. Commercial activities include, but are not limited to, promotional announcements, product-related press releases, and advertising. Should such messages appear on the listserv, MECnet reserves the right to reject the posting.
- When asking questions please request that individuals reply directly to you. After all the replies have been gathered, you may post a summary to the list. When replying to messages, do not reply to the entire list if a reply is directed at a single individual. Replying to the individual may be more appropriate. Replies of a personal nature should not be sent to the group.
Please note that the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the MECnet organization. As owners of the list, however, we reserve the right to reject any posting that we deem to be in violation of these guidelines or otherwise inappropriate.
Service Level Agreements
- MECnet - Service Level Agreement
This Service Level Agreement (SLA) documents MECnet's commitment to provide high quality connectivity for our valued customers.
- MECnet's target service objectives are:
Network availability of 99.999%. This equals less than 5 minutes of any service interruption per month.
- Network latency of less than 15ms within the MECnet system.
- Engineering design objective for packet loss of under 0.01% in the network portions controlled and administered by MECnet.
Note: These target service objectives shall under no circumstances be construed or interpreted to be a representation or warranty by MECnet.
- Performance Guarantee Credit
In the event of a continuous network outage of 30 minutes (after CPE is eliminated) or more per 24-hour period, MECnet will credit the customer's account a 1-day pro-rated portion of their monthly recurring charge for the affected service. Customers must request credit by sending a detailed message including the time and date of the network outage to credit@mecnet.net. MECnet will investigate the claim and notify you with the results within one week.
The Performance Guarantee Credit excludes scheduled outages, outages related to customer responsibilities as defined in the contract and outages beyond MECnet's network.
- Network Outage Definition
A service is considered "unavailable" if five consecutive pings from MECnet's NOC monitoring stations to the customer serial interface on the subscriber unit fail. Interruption does not include problems related to the customer's local area network (LAN) or any service failure caused by power outages in customer's location or acts of hacking or denial of service by a third party attacking MECnet network or the customers, acts of God and terrorism.
- Availability
MECnet's network availability target is 99.999% and the system and network is monitored on a 24-hour / 7 days per week basis. In the event of a major service outage, our system alarms automatically notify our Support Staff about the problem.
- Performance Reporting
MECnet's performance reporting is maintained on our backbone monitoring system and can be provided to our customers upon request.
- Network Latency Design
MECnet's network architecture is designed with a network latency objective of less than 15ms for a T1 customer as defined as the roundtrip time from the gateway router (customer) to the core router (MECnet gateway router/Monitoring system) averaged over a month period.
- Technical Support
For technical information or assistance of a non-emergency nature during regular business hours (7:00 -4:30), contact our Technical Support at (978) 262-4000 option 1 or by email at support@MECnet.net.
- Emergency Support Guidelines
A customer can report any service problem to our Network Operation Centre (NOC) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The telephone number is (978) 262-4000, press 400 for network connectivity problems or 401 for backbone services problems such as Email, content filtering, web hosting and DNS. Leave a message and a technician will contact you within one hour.
Before calling, please have the following information available so that your call can be handled more efficiently.
- Customer name
- Name of caller and call back information
- Location of problem and circuit id
- Type of problem
- A detailed description of the nature of the call
- Scheduled Maintenance
Planned down times will be scheduled with a minimum one week notice. Broadcast email messages to all customers will also be sent. MECnet does not gaurentee that you will receive the email broadcast so please check the helpdesk website frequently for scheduled network maintenance activity at www.mecnet.net/helpdesk
- Emergency Restoration
Unfortunately problems do occur that require emergency restoration of services. When emergency restoration is required, MECnet will provide as much lead-time as possible, and will always strive to minimize the impact on customers.
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
MECnet strives to restore customer services in a timely manner. In the event that we need to dispatch one of our field service technicians, our goal is to achieve a 2-hour response to site, MTTR of four hours. Repair times are contingent on MECnet having prompt access to the necessary equipment and infrastructure at the customer location. Problems that require technicians to dispatch identified after 2:00 p.m. will be scheduled first call on next business day. On occasion, conditions that are beyond MECnet's control may cause reasonable and understandable delay in MTTR. Examples of such conditions include acts of God, war, terrorism, and severe weather conditions.
- SLA Amendments
MECnet may revise, update, or improve this SLA, from time to time, as required and it is expected that revisions to this SLA may include, but are not limited to, performance objectives, definitions, process improvements, SLA wording to improve usability, etc.
Web-Based Support Forms All forms are sent to the Helpdesk so contact information can be verified before tickets are opened.
- Request for Disabling of Content Filtering
Request of Disabling of Content Filtering Form
- Update Helpdesk Contact List
Customers should use this form to submit changes to MECnet's Authorized Contact List. The MECnet Helpdesk uses this contact list to verify the authority of the person opening a Helpdesk ticket. Administrative contacts can specify the authority of sub-contacts to specify what they can contact us about. For example, if you have a webmaster, you can have him/her listed as a contact just for web hosting issues.
Update Your Contact List Form
- DNS Requests
Changing DNS (Domain Name System) records is very important especially when implementing a new server. For this reason we have created this form to make sure that your request is completed accurately and efficiently.
DNS Change/Addition Request Form
- Port Forwarding
In an effort to help customers better secure their networks, and still make services "live" to the world, MECnet port forwards the TCP/UDP ports that are needed. (We discourage the use of direct one-to-one NATs and encourage current users of one-to-one NATs to change their methods for security reasons.) For example, web servers run on TCP port 80. In this case we would only port forward port 80 to your web server behind your Joebox Firewall or your Cisco router, rather than allow access to the entire server.
Port Forwarding Request Form
- VPN Account
Would you like to manage your servers from a different location? As long as you have a Joebox Firewall, we can create VPN accounts so you can remotely manage your network or servers from virtually anywhere.
VPN Account Request Form
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