NZART website back on-line

The NZART (New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters) website is now back on-line following a series of major problems experienced by the society's ISP.

NZART's Jamie Pye ZL2NN explains the problems:

The NZART Web and e-mail ISP in the USA has had problems with diggers digging up fibre cables, to problems when changing the method of connecting to the Internet.

What has been the effect here is loss of service and a step back in time of the Web pages, when the ISP used an out-of-date backup.

Attempts at correcting the out-of-date Web pages have been frustrated because of the loss of FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The loss of FTP was over a greater time span than that of the Web page access, giving users an incorrect impression that nothing was being done to correct the problem, or to advise user of the problems that had occurred.

With the last bout of problems occurring over the weekend 16/17 May, FTP wasn't available until midday Tuesday 19-May-2009. The delay in updating the Web has been to ensure it was reliable once again.

No advise was received that an out-of-date backup had been used until it was seen on the Website. Also, in the change over of the e-mail to another server, there was a loss of almost 400 addresses from the Infoline bulk mailing list, rendering it useless to post Infoline 184. The Webmaster's backup list was used manually to send out Infoline 184 and special bulletin 22s.

So let us all hope that the problems we have been having are over and we can get on with other matters.

Jamie Pye ZL2NN

New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters