Hardware crash hits Telstra's Big Pond users - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Hardware crash hits Telstra's Big Pond users

By Andrew Colley, 0
October 25, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Hardware-crash-hits-Telstra-s-Big-Pond-users/0,130061791,120269243,00.htm

A weekend hardware failure has hampered attempts by users of Telstra's Big Pond cable service to gain access to the Internet for about two days, with some customers continuing to experience problems until this morning.

At around 6am on Saturday, Big Pond cable server hardware responsible for allocating IP addresses failed, leaving customers using DOCSIS compliant modems scrambling to secure a place on the service.

According to Telstra, customers that were not logged on to the service during the incident were forced to make repeated login attempts in order to be assigned an IP address.

It appears that the hardware failure greatly diminished the service's capacity to allocate IP addresses.

"We still haven't identified the root cause but we have alleviated the pressure on the load-handling capability of the computer of that allocates IP addresses and the impact should now should be negligible," said Telstra spokesperson Kerrina Lawrence.

Lawrence conceded some customers may still have been experiencing problems related to the failure until this morning.

According to Lawrence the problem has been referred to the equipment vendor for further investigation.

Refusing to name the equipment vendor, Telstra is reserving its comment on the disruption to closely-worded statements. However the statements it has made today echo those it issued in March when a routine software upgrade left some customers with DOCSIS modems offline for 12 hours.

Telstra conducted the software upgrade in the early hours of the morning, forcing customers issued with DOCSIS compliant cable modems to re-authenticate and be assigned with new IP addresses. However Bigpond's servers were unable to cope with the sudden rash of log-on attempts.

"We had some issues with the servers' traffic handling capabilities," said the Telstra spokesperson in March.