Telstra posted a message on the news group server on 2 July that alerted users to the planned upgrade. Problems were only encountered by customers that had configured their software to find the server by its IP address--which was changed during the upgrade--and not its domain name.
"On the 2nd of July we posted a message up on the news server advising customers that we'd be carrying out an upgrade on the 9th of July," a Telstra spokeswoman told ZDNet Australia . "Customers do need to take note of the associated advice that comes with the upgrade".
Around 14,500 BigPond broadband customers use the service, she said, so the number of users affected is quite small in context.
Although the message did tell customers exactly what would happen, problems were encountered by some people who had either not read the advice, or hadn't logged on between 2-9 July, and were thus unable to receive the message.
Telstra had contemplated sending out an e-mail to all subscribers, but without knowing who exactly uses the services, it realised it would be irrelevant to 94 percent of them.
The upgraded server will hold much more than the few days of news posts the older machine was capable of.
"The new server will be able to hold many months worth of news," the spokeswoman said.
Users who are unable to reach the news server should update their software to point to either "news-server" or 61.9.191.5 if they must specify an IP address.
The article doesn't tell the whole story.
Firstly some of the advice contained in the Bigpond posting was incorrect.
Quote
"Newsgroup article re-numbering will occur as a result of the upgrade. To avoid synchronisation problems with article headers stored locally in News readers, customers are advised to synchronise the headers for newsgroups to which they subscribe"
That didn't work. You had to in fact reset the subscribed newsgroups to see new posts.
Quote
"If synchronising the news headers after 05:00 EST is not successful,customers are advised to reboot their PC or gateway device to ensure new DNS entries for the News server are automatically configured."
For many regions around Australia the new news-server was unreachable using the name news-server.bigpond.net.au in the account field of their newsreader.
This was because the DNS system took a few days to stop pointing to the old i.p. address of the news server.
I myself had to specify the exact i.p. address of the new news server to be able to gain access.
There have been some threads on this subject in the Whirlpool forums.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=96667