Editorial
Welcome to yet another of our iiNet Newsletters. Long time members will know that we put these out regularly. Newer users may believe that if they wish.

Since it has been some time since we last put out a newsletter, we'll use this issue to introduce the staff, most of whom have only joined us in the last three months.

Deanne Godfrey is the friendly voice that usually answers the telephones. Traditionally, Deanne has handled over half of the 300 calls per day that our support staff receive. Deanne is our Staff Manager and handles user support and accounts in her spare time. She is really fond of kittens, so if you find any on the web, email the locations to her.

Michael O'Reilly is employed by the company to ensure that the Wildcats win the Basketball this year. In the precious little spare time remaining, he is also our Technical Director, responsible for keeping the iiNet network up and running on a day to day basis. Michael O'Reilly handballs all the distasteful tasks to Michael Malone.

Michael Malone is the nightwatchman, keeping an eye on the system while the other Michael is at the basketball. He also handles all email support and gets to play with all the toys remotely. Michael Malone hasn't been seen since July, giving creedance to the belief that he has been replaced by some clever auto responder scripts. Michael Malone handballs all the distasteful tasks to Michael O'Reilly.

Justin Lowe is responsible for dealing with recursion in distasteful task handling. He also does user support, authors our own web pages and is in charge of the Web Affiliate program. He is our resident expert on Win 95 and keeps on managing to sneak really bad types of music into our machine names when we're not looking.

Ron Bertino is the latest full time addition to our staff, joining us just this week. Ron has left the a stressful career as a teacher to join our user support team. Coincidently, this has occurred in the same quarter that the Computing profession has overtaken Teaching as the number one occurrance of stress related illness in Australia. Ron also has a secret identity as the maintainer of the UFO Archives.

Anthony Phillips is our last staff member, currently on part time. Anthony is determined to show Deanne how user support is supposed to be done, and has managed to usurp her by handling nearly as many calls as she has this week. He is also in charge of the company's research division, currently investigating a textual interface to a bounded economy and societal simulation (ok, it's a MUD, but its a good MUD)

Honourable mentions should also go to Claire Maree Vann from Step by Step Software, Trevor Harris from the Mac Doctor and all the people at IQ PC, who all do contract work for us.

And that's our staff roll call for this week!

How and when to get Support
Now that you know our support staff, I suppose it would be a good idea to tell you how to talk to them!

There are three ways of getting free help on the system, listed in the order we would like you to try:

1. Online documentation
2. Email
3. Telephone

Online Documentation
The option is staffed 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and can have extremely fast response times. Check out the README file, try out the Help menus, and if you still can't locate anything, move on to the next option.

Email
There are two addresses worth knowing for email help:

help@iinet.net.au and support@iinet.net.au

Be careful when using the "help" address. This actually goes to the public newsgroup wa.help, so lots of people can read your message. However, since lots of people can read it, you will often get a very quick response from some helpful person!

support@iinet.net.au is directed to a smaller list of people (currently two). One of these people can usually get you an answer fairly quickly or direct the email to someone that can help.

Email is always our preferred option. In many cases, we have answers to common questions prepared, which can just be sent to you as well. Also, it can be extremely useful to have point by point instructions in writing for complex tasks.

Of course, if you can't read or send email, its probably a good idea to give us a call.

Telephone
Our telephone support staff are available on 9214 2222 at the following times:

9AM to 7PM, Monday to Friday

excluding public holidays (when we notice that it is one).

Outside of these times, your message will be sent to a paging system. This pager is always carried by one of our technicians on a rotational basis. So if a message is received such as:

John Smith called on 555-1234. The system appears to be down. I can't read or send email and the web isn't working.

then our technician can immediately respond to the problem. However, if we receive a message like

Call John on 555-1234.

this will be left until normal hours.

Why?

Originally, most of the support calls, at all times, were answered by Michael Malone and Michael O'Reilly. Now, the Michaels have turned their attentions primarily to maintaining and upgrading the system, with results hopefully being apparent in the recent increased capacity and stability of our network (touch wood, fingers crossed etc). Hiring people to answer telephone calls 24 hours per day has proved to be beyond our current budget. Besides, our support staff are always chirpier during the day.

Chain Letters
Two people on the system have sent out chain letters. These are illegal in Western Australia. If a recipient of a chain letter makes a complaint to the WA Police, we will have no choice but to turn over copies of login records and mail logs to show that the offense did occur. A very pleasant lady from Sydney is so annoyed about these chain letters that she is considering this now, and she has been offered our support.

These things are not funny. Some people find them extremely distressing and just about everyone finds them annoying. If you're worried about the "bad luck" of not sending them on, feel free to send all 10 copies to support@iinet.net.au and we'll find something creative to do with them.

System Setup Changes
For those who haven't seen it already, we are asking people to make a number of changes to their configuration. This is very visible to Trumpet users, but may have been overlooked by others. In summary all the following need to be changed:

                      OLD                   NEW

Domain Name Server    203.0.178.6           203.0.178.191
NNTP Server           news                  news.m.iinet.net.au
SMTP Server           mail.iinet.net.au     mail.m.iinet.net.au
proxies               203.0.178.6           proxy.m.iinet.net.au

We'll now look at each in a little more detail

Unix Specific
To change your Domain Name Server, edit /etc/resolv.conf and change the nameserver line to be 203.0.178.191. This doesn't apply to permanents!

The NNTP and SMTP servers are only going to be relevant if you are using tin remotely (oh my) and smart hosting your email to us. If you are doing this, and aren't sure what to do, it's probably best to send some email to

support@iinet.net.au

with some more details about your setup

OS/2 Specific
OS/2 users will need to change their Domain Name Server in the Network Setup section to 203.0.178.191. If you are using the OS/2 Web Browser, run the browser. At the top of the page there is a "Configure" menu item. Click on that, select "Servers" and

http://proxy.m.iinet.net.au:80/

goes in the "Proxy Gateway" box. Configuration for news and email will depend on which applications you use.

Macintosh Specific
With the advent of the new release of MacTCP, some of these instructions may be a little out. Go to the Control Panel and select MacTCP. Go to the second page (usually by clicking on More...) Down the bottom will be a section on DNS (Domain Name Server) It should read:

Domain 		IP Number		Default
-----------------------------------------------

iinet.net.au	203.0.178.191		   X
iinet.com.au	203.0.178.191

Netscape
Go to the Options menu and select Preferences. There will be a white bar at the top of the page, probably with the word `Styles''. Click on this and it will open up to a bigger list of pages. Select `Proxies''.

You should configure the proxies as follows:

Gopher Proxy		proxy.m.iinet.net.au		80
HTTP Proxy		proxy.m.iinet.net.au		80
FTP Proxy		Leave Blank
News Proxy		Leave Blank
WAIS Proxy		proxy.m.iinet.net.au		80

Why?
So why all the changes? We now have three dial in rotaries, with a number due to open in other locations shortly. The problem is that things such as your Proxy server are really dependant upon which location you call. For instance, if you call us in Padbury (on the 3075801 rotary) it is not a good idea to use one of our Perth machines to read your News. Similarly, if you are dialing into our Perth node, it is not a good idea to use our Padbury machines for your web proxies.

In each case, it should work, but will be slower.

New Release of Windows 3.11 Software
A full release of our Windows 3.11 Software is now available for download. In order to do this, run Netscape (the WWW icon) and click on Open. A window will pop up. Type in

ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/iinet/

and press Enter. A listing of files will appear. One of these is called

iinet.exe

which will be in Blue. Hold down the left shift key on your keyboard. Don't let it go. Then click on the word "iinet.exe" with your mouse.

A window will pop up asking you where you wish to save the file. Place the file in an empty directory. If you don't have an empty directory, use

C:\INTERNET\DOWNLOAD

which should be mostly empty. Now leave the file to download. Depending on which number you are connected to, and what modem speed you have, this will take from 30 to 90 minutes to complete.

When it has successfully finished, exit out of Windows completely, to the DOS prompt. Don't use the MSDOS prompt icon. Actually exit out of Windows. If you placed the file in C:\INTERNET\DOWNLOAD then you need to type the following commands:

 C:
 CD \INTERNET\DOWNLOAD
 IINET
 WIN SETUP

and the software should install itself. It will ask you for some details, including your login name, Real Name and your password, so make sure you have these all on hand before beginning.

It's not that difficult to do, but if you are a little nervous, let us know and we'll send some diskettes out to you by Australia Post. The only disadvantage is that this may take a week or two.

Batch FTP Now Available
Tired of waiting for those physiological studies to download from Sweden during peak times? Sick of waiting for those important recreational/relaxation programmes to reach your computer from the USA? Frustrated by the killer daemon kicking you off just when your download has reached 98%?

Well, we now have a batch FTP facility available on iiNet. In order to use it, you must first locate the file that you wish to download. For instance, if you had located a file in Finland at the URL

ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/linux/WHICH.ONE

All you need to do is send an email message to

batch@iinet.net.au

with the words

get ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/linux/WHICH.ONE

in the body of the mail (not in the subject line). You will be emailed back instructions on the next and final step. You may have multiple get requests in a single email message. You may also include wildcards.

The files will be downloaded into your home directory, in a subdirectory called "ftp". You can then collect these directly.

Please remember:

• Check that you have sufficient remaining credit before making a request. This _does_ come off your credit.

• It doesn't happen immediately. Once downloaded, you will be emailed a confirmation note. This may take 12 to 24 hours.

• Delete the files after you have successfully downloaded them to your own machine.

• Please check local mirrors first. In future, we may integrate some intelligence into the processer, but for now it relies on your own intelligence.

Bug reports of failures to support@iinet.net.au please.

Revision of pricing for dialups
We have just changed the pricing for all Volume Limited Dialup Accounts (these are the $25 per month ones). The monthly rate remains the same, but formerly volume was charged at

        Within WA                       Free
        Interstate                      $1.50 per Meg
        International                   $2.00 per Meg

with the first $10 of traffic as a "soft limit" each month.

From now on, the rates will be

        Within the iiNet Network        Free
        All other Traffic               $1.00 per Meg

Bunbury is now open!
Yes, iiNet is now proud to join the other three providers offering local call services in Bunbury and surrounding districts. Never before has so small a town been offered so much by so many.

Prices for Bunbury access are the same as for access to our Perth nodes. People using our new scripts should also be able to dial in to Perth or Bunbury without making any changes to their software setup. Just change the telephone number and dial in.

There are 16 lines available at the moment, all 28.8K. Anyone who lives down that way, or who is going to be visiting there, should contact us for the phone number.

Coming Changes
The next two months are going to see a number of extremely important changes occurring on the iiNet network. It is really important that people are aware of these changes, although we will do our best to keep everyone informed via the iinet.general newsgroup.

This is a rough schedule of our plans for the next six weeks. In this industry it is pointless to make concrete plans beyond a couple of months. We just plan direction, and keep ourselves ready for change!

mid October        Perth to Nedlands link upgrade to 256K
mid October        increase of Perth 28.8K rotary to 65 lines
late October       All UUCP services moved to Perth (grunge)
late October       closure of 3804528 rotary
late October       dial up services available in Bunbury (ahead of schedule)
early November     dial up services available in Busselton
early November     movement of Classic AND Jazz to Perth
early November     closure of 3075801 rotary.
early November     increase of Perth 14.4K rotary to 70 lines
early November     decrease of Padbury->Nedlands link to 64K
mid November       increase of Perth 28.8K rotary to 80 lines
mid November       increase of Perth->Nedlands link to 512K
mid November       link to Telstra moves to Perth instead of Nedlands
late November      closure of entire Padbury node.

The timing of some of these events are based on factors that we may not be able to control. Our Busselton link has been deferred because Telstra cannot get lines in in time. However, this outline should let people get an idea of what to expect.

For those who missed it above, I repeat

EARLY NOVEMBER CLOSURE OF 307 5801 ROTARY

Despite the fact that we now have more modems in Perth than in Padbury (85 versus 55), Padbury still receives over 1000 calls per day, compared with Perth's feeble 700 (but increasing). So, we have reason to believe that most people are still not aware of how to change to the new phone numbers. If this is the case, please contact us via email or telephone and we'll try to assist.

And as a final closing note:

WE'RE CLOSING THE 307 5801 ROTARY!

Until next time

Thanks
iiNet Staff