Editorial
As usual, this month has seen many changes applied across our organisation and our network. We expect to be able to announce a number of fairly major upgrades over the next four to six weeks, but the object to this newsletter is to notify people of the current status of our network and what we are doing to address concerns of our members.

Thanks to the many people that have given us assistance in ironing out recent problems and for the patience and perserverance of all of our members.

Ongoing Problems
There have been a number of persistant, but elusive, problems occurring on our network over the past two months. These have included:

a) "Mail Timeout" when checking or sending mail.

This is a persistant and extremely annoying problem. We are gradually trying different solutions to it, but are reluctant to call it completely "fixed". In the last few days, we have changed the way our ethernet works and done some more work on the DNS (domain name servers) in an attempt to fix this.

If you are having problems sending email, it is usually due to a misconfiguration. Please talk with or email our support staff about this.

b) Modems not giving a login prompt.

Having spent over a fortnight tracking each individual modem on our rotaries (over 150 in the CBD alone), this now appears to be considerably less of a problem. Please do keep us informed if problems persist.

c) No available "ptys" on opera.

This one is really only applicable to our shell users. It was due to a hard limit of 64 total ptys on opera. This has now been extended to 256.

d) USENet news being way behind.

Our new News machine, Disco, was installed a week ago. It is handling a sustaining eight articles per second, and the news feed to Perth and Nedlands appears to be catching up at a furious rate. Rather than duplicate this in Padbury, we have closed down the Padbury News server.

In short, problems are arising, but we really are working on them as fast as humanly possible. Staff have been superb by taking on additional workload in order to free up the system administrators to tackle these problems full time. This has been assisted by the patient and concise fault reports by members (especially Anthony Shipley and Bruce Murphy) who send us a report of the time and nature of problems whenever they do occur (minus the abuse).

Staff Additions
Since our last newsletter, just prior to Christmas, we have added another three staff members. Billy Shields has been a long time dial up member of iiNet and is now on full time telephone support. Kylie Bone came to us as a full time receptionist, but is proving invaluable in general office organisation and point of contact sales. More recently, Kim Davies has been drafted into weekend support duties. Kim has been a visible member of the Western Australian Internet community for over three years.

If it seems that we add new staff every time that a newsletter is sent, its because we do. We now have ten full time staff members, from just two less than a year ago. It is extremely interesting to be involved in an industry that is this dynamic. However, it also carries some risks with it. Since the industry is so new, it is not possible to locate staff with the prerequisite support skills. It would be greatly appreciated if clients could recognise this when calling. If you would like the problem efficiently dealt with:

1. Let the support person know your user name.
2. Tell them what sort of machine you have as early in the call/email as possible. It is a waste of your time if our support person gives you an answer for Windows when you have a Macintosh.
3. If you feel you are getting an incorrect answer, let them know as quickly as possible.

Extended Support Hours
Our standard telephone support hours for the past have been

        Monday to Friday           9AM to 7PM
        Saturday                   noon to 5PM

        Monday to Friday           9AM to 10PM
        Weekends                   10AM to 5PM

Email Support
In the past, email support has been wholly handled by one person, in addition to his normal workload. As the number of support messages has passed over one hundred per day, response times have become unacceptable.

We have no implemented a system by which all of our support staff can contribute to email support requests. In theory, this will mean that response times should be much shorter and the pool of available knowledge wider. In practise, there have been some teething problems as people (both members and staff) get used to the new arrangement.

Telstra Upgrades
Although iiNet has a total of three links to the global Internet, the one we rely most heavily upon is our link to Telstra. Unfortunately, Telstra has been having problems of their own in recents months, with unprecedanted growth across their network. This has led to poor performance on all their links, but particularly on the International link. You may hear reference to "10% packet loss" being swung around. This means that one in every ten pieces of information being sent over this link needs to be sent again. This results in some undesirable conditions, particularly under congestion, so the end result is that downloads can be two or three times slower.

A fortnight ago, Telstra moved their two international links into a to Sydney, where they then connect to California. This has seen loss drop to around 5%, which is better but still not acceptable. This week, Telstra will be adding in a third 6M link, bringing the total available bandwidth to 18M out of Australia via Telstra.

We are far from assuming that this will magically fix all slow responses. However the change should be very noticable, particularly in IRC and FTP.

UUCP Moved
All UUCP feeds have been moved from Padbury to the City. We have been trying to contact all mail affiliates and dial up uucp account holders, and will continue to do so. However, the change should be as simple as changing the phone number from 3075801 to 3227331.

Web Pages
Most people are already aware of this, but all dial up iiNet clients have the ability to create their own world wide web pages. There is no charge for this. People that wish to be included on the Zoo pages should email

       webmaster@iinet.net.au