The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Internet Newsletter 25 George Skarbek |
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It has been some time since my last newsletter because our Internet has been stable and (with only minor changes) and there was nothing special to report.
This newsletter is to inform members of forthcoming changes. Firstly an update on Comindico.
Currently we have 60 phone lines with Comindico with the Greater Melbourne numbers servicing members in outer areas, and the National Roaming numbers that enable members who are travelling to dial into our Internet for the price of a local call from anywhere in Australia. I used this regularly when I drove to Darwin and back during my recent holiday. Also, we take 50% of our Internet capacity (data) from Comindico.
Some of you will be aware that very recently Comindico was placed into voluntary receivership. However, we have been informed by the Receivers that Comindico will be sold as a trading company and will not be wound up. AAPT who currently provides the other 50% of our Internet feed can be called upon to provide the full bandwidth at very short notice if Comindico should eventually fold.
Obtaining alternative dial-up lines for the greater Melbourne and National Roaming access would take some time. As a precaution I have already met with Telstra and made enquiries about it providing these services and currently I am waiting for a response.
Moving our Internet
When the office moves to Chadstone, our Internet servers will not go there but will be relocated to the AAPT Data Centre at Burnley. This is a much more secure site where all power, cooling and security services, etc. are duplicated with allowance for all types of redundancy - they even have local water storage for the air-conditioning in case of a catastrophic failure of multiple systems.
A great deal of planning had gone into the exercise and we may be able to complete the move without a total shutdown of the system. This is because we have duplicate servers and the primary server can be moved while the backup takes over as we complete the move in several stages. However, as one bank of modems is being transferred, naturally it will be unavailable so if you encounter that please try dialling another number. We expect the move to be finalised by the end of October.
We plan for the phone numbers to be migrated as well so there should be no need to make any changes at your end. One exception - the 9934 9400 phone number will be discontinued.
In the unlikely case that there are some urgent and essential outages all users will receive an e-mail giving details of the proposed outage. In the meantime I recommend that you continue to read the MOTD (Message Of The Day) screen at regular intervals. This is at http://hww.melbpc.org.au/motd/ for members dialling in directly, and https://wss.melbpc.org.au/motd/ for those accessing through another provider.
Reprinted from the November 2004 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
