Editorial
1995 is rapidly drawing to a close. For iiNet it has been a year of incredibly rapid growth, and all our efforts have been dedicated into meeting the challenge of just keeping up with this growth. We believe that current work practises will enable us to continue expanding throughout 1996 without adversely affecting our existing client base.

In 1996, we intend to direct our efforts largely into improving the existing service. Certainly, we will be continue to concentrate on stabilising the network, expanding our modem pool rapidly, and ensuring that adequate "bandwidth" is available to meet the needs of all our members. Another 32 modems will be added to our Perth rotaries by mid January, and we have a firm plan for meeting growth throughout the coming six months and thereafter.

However, we also intend to expand our customer support services, ensure that more documentation is available, offer training courses and tutorials, and expand the number of services that are "rolled" into our existing products.

1996 should be a year of change, as is necessary to meet the explosive growth of the Internet, but the nature of this change should be more subtle and stable. We sincerely hope that our current members will stay to enjoy the ride with us.

Finally, the iiNet staff would like to take this opportunity to wish all our members a happy and safe Christmas and New Year.

Christmas Opening Hours
iiNet will of course be available for dial up access right through Christmas and the New Year. However, our support personnel have actually asked for time off, so this will result in reduced access to support and sales over the next week or so.

Saturday  23/12/95   Email support only.
Sunday    24/12/95   Email support only.
Monday    25/12/95   Email support only.
Tuesday   26/12/95   Email support only.
Wednesday 27/12/95   Operating as usual.
Thursday  28/12/95   Operating as usual.
Friday    29/12/95   Operating as usual.
Saturday  30/12/95   Email support only.
Sunday    31/12/95   Email support only.
Monday    01/01/96   Email support only.
Tuesday   02/01/96   and henceforth, operating as usual.

Email support is always available. Our usual telephone operating hours are:

Monday to Friday 9AM to 7PM

Outside of these hours, support is still available by email by sending a message to

support@iinet.net.au

Email support will operate as usual across the Christmas and New Year break.

If there is a confirmed fault on the network, this may be reported by email or by telephoning on 9214-2222. A paging service will answer, and a detailed report of the fault should be made to the paging service. This will then be sent to one of our Technical staff who will attend to the matter immediately. Confirmation of receipt and handling of the paging message will be sent via email.

Support Staff
The last two months have seen a number of additions to our support staff list again. Anthony Peacock has completed his contract with the company and chosen to move on to bigger and better things. His roll as principle Unix support officer has been more than adequately filled by Anthony Phillips, who is now a full time member of staff.

Charlie Stephens has also joined the crew, taking us to seven full time staff members. Until now, Charlie has been involved in high quality hardware sales and support through local manufacturer Comdek Computers. We have had a long and successful relationship with Comdek, whom we have chosen to supply all of our Unix Servers. Charlie is currently involved primarily with member support.

Photographs and a brief description of all our staff are available on the World Wide Web at

http://www.iinet.net.au/iinet/staff.html

People calling our support lines may also be pleased to hear a cheery new voice answering the telephones. This is Billy Shields, who has joined us for December and January while many of our other staff take staggered (and in some cases, staggering) holidays. Billy was one of the very first members to join iiNet and has extensive experience on the Internet.

Current Contact Details

Just a quick reminder that our postal address has now changed to:

iiNet Technologies Pty Ltd
Letter Box One
105 St Georges Terrace
Perth  WA  6000

So if you're sending in your payment for the next decade, it would be great if you could use this address.

Internet Guide
We have recently finished the first edition of our "Internet Guide". This guide contains documentation on the use of many of the Internet programs and some details about the Internet itself.

The guide is RRP $30, but is available at $15 to existing members. Bulk purchases for educational or corporate use may also be negotiated.

We're extremely proud of the content and presentation of this guide. We are attempting to "mirror" all the same information to the tutorial section on our World Wide Web pages as well, so that people can access the material while they are on line at no cost.

Link Upgrade
In early December, Telstra upgraded their interstate link from 2M to 4M. They have announced a further upgrade to 6M to be implemented before the end of the year. Their international link remains over utilised, and will see any major upgrades until April.

As a result, iiNet have taken a third Internet link to national carrier Access One. We have initially installed a 256K link to Access One, which has resulted in a rapidly improving throughput on International transfers.

In the medium term, iiNet is investigating alternatives to our current policy of purchasing bandwidth from national carriers. We are committed to providing the highest quality interstate and international access.

Introduction of Opera
In the last three weeks, shell users have been more than aware of a new machine being added to our network. This computer is called opera.iinet.net.au and it is exclusively for "shell" logins. It is located in Perth, meaning much faster access to many services.

For non shell users, this has also seen a number of small side effects. All new web pages must now be uploaded to opera instead of classic. There is documentation on how to create and upload web pages available at

http://www.iinet.net.au/tutorial/

It has also seen email being handled from Perth instead of Padbury, resulting in a fairly dramatic improvement in response time.

In response to a rather vocal minority on our local newsgroup, iinet.general, opera has also become the home for a local newsserver.

PGP Key
A couple of people have asked whether it is safe to send their credit card details via email. It isn't really safe to do this. Your email is like a postcard. It is wide open for any of the "postal workers" to look at. Admittedly, there is so much email passing around that the risk of anyone looking at -your- email is very small.

Nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to take precautions. The common way to do this on the Internet is to "encrypt" your message using a program such as PGP. PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy" and it is. It uses a scheme called Public Key Encryptography. Typically, if you want to send a message, you write it in a normal text editor. You then use PGP to "encrypt" it, and send the encrypted message in your normal mail program. Some platforms allow for a much more "integrated" use of PGP with your mailer.

Copies of PGP for most platforms are available in

ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/mirrors/pgp/

We would encourage people to use PGP for all messages, instead of just the "sensitive" ones. If you only use it for important messages, it becomes pretty obvious which ones need to be worked on.

Email may be sent to support@iinet.net.au and accounts@iinet.net.au using the following PGP public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.2i

mQBtAzDOY7EAAAEDAJ72JW47CArt/Z2Nl4aNCPw/zfMYbRGeC9fPaEjWXa+EH0P7
uS7viO1Wd0nZs82ev8UxWxppuWG8sgo+3FWaXT5Mn7NlRqZq8OTo3pZgPcvyd8Mr
F529ufH2ZV/T9l6eqQAFEbQkTWljaGFlbCBNYWxvbmUgPHBhcmlhaEBpaW5ldC5u
ZXQuYXU+
=Ubbx
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----