wonk v3.0

Victorians hit by DSL outage (Australian IT).

A more in depth article on the Telstra ADSL outages this week.

Since Telstra are on my radar at the moment.. Telstra probes top-level ad deal (The Age).

BigPond hit by nation-wide outage (Australian IT).

“BigPond dialup and ADSL was out from 2.30 this morning until 8.55am after a partial failure in a switch in the core of the network.“

I find this article interesting for two reasons. Firstly because it only states BigPond had an outage, not the whole Telstra ADSL network in Victoria, which includes wholesale customers such as Optus, Comindico, Netspace, etc. Secondly because it says BigPond dialup was also having issues. Bigpond dialup is a retail product of Telstra, and should not (in theory) share any authentication infrastructure with the wholesale ADSL product. I’m not sure if the article is correct on that point since I didn’t check for dial outages at the time of the outage and the Telstra Service Status page is claiming there were no issues with BigPond dialup yesterday. They do report on the ADSL outage though:

Service Disruption Started: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 7:00:00 AM EST
Service Disruption Ended: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 9:45:00 PM EST
Last Updated: Tuesday, 25 May 2004 10:39:59 PM EST
Customer Impact: Some customers in Victoria may be having difficulty logging onto the internet. We are working to fix the problem as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience

My home ADSL was down again from 19:56:27 until 20:03:30, but seems to have been stable since then.

May 25 11:05:34 Down
May 25 11:08:05 Up
May 25 11:39:35 Down
May 25 13:59:37 Up

Thanks Telstra. No really, thanks. I wasn’t planning on sending or receiving any data today anyway. *grumble*

My ADSL line is down again this morning. Rumor has it scheduled maintenance went wrong or has run over time and lots of sites in Victoria are impacted. Once again, excellent service from the ‘world class’ telco.

UPDATE: It’s working again now:

May 25 06:19:40 Down
May 25 07:05:43 Up
May 25 07:52:39 Down
May 25 07:56:18 Up
May 25 08:26:43 Down
May 25 09:27:27 Up

AFL Tips updated. I got 6 this round - I didn’t pick the Eddies beating the Crows and the Doggies defeating the Blues.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. The response from the White House was similar to meh.

My Cisco IP Phone 7910s have arrived and are up and running. With the exception of creating the .cnf files they request over TFTP at bootup the whole process of getting them working was surprisingly easy. Last night I was even able to call a local company over IP to enquire about some of the PC hardware they sell of connecting to the PSTN. Also, thanks to IAXtel I can dial USA 1800 numbers for free. How good is that!?

When the oil sticks . . . (The Age)

No news on when the film will be screened to the public in the USA or Australia.

I have updated my tips page. I’m averaging 5 per round, which isn’t great, but better than average.