Robert@PNG

Due to a couple of issues I have not been able to post to my blog the last couple of days.

Issue#1:

Front page in yesterday's Post Courier:

PNG Power men pull the plug on city lights

BLACKOUT:
PNG Power shift workers at 4pm yesterday stayed true to their threat and
shut down the Rauna Hydro Power Station (pictured), leaving the Capital
with no electricity.

Picture: JOE IVAHARIA.

Issue#2:

The following email came in today from Datec (ISP):

Dear Valued Client,

Re:    Datec In-dial Access Lines [Fri-13.07.07]

We wish to inform all valued clients that due to telecommunications problems currently experienced attempts to contact the Datec Head Office and ISP services via indial telephone lines have been affected.

We suspect the Telikom fibre-optic service between the Datec Head Office building and the Boroko Exchange has continued to malfunction since the Boroko exchange power outage yesterday (Thu-12.07.07) morning and a reset by Telikom is required to fully restore services.

As a result of the above failures customers accessing the 303 1XXX range of numbers plus the 188 0555 and 188 0559 numbers for dial-up will encounter connection disruptions during dial-in attempts.

Full restoration of services is being attempted and in the meantime users are advised to contact Datec on 325 9022 for any customer service assistance.

Thank you, and we will advise further developments accordingly.

Issue#3:

I received another email from my ISP a couple of days ago (the curse of UNITECH seems to be following me):

Robert,

Thank you for your email, we will certainly
investigate the issues you raise. FYI there were significant issues impacting
PNG over the w/e 
Following is an extract from the managers of the
international internet gateway this Sunday past:

Recently, Lae Unitech have decided to do the following to the
“pg” 
domain which they administrate on behalf of the country:

-
Reduce the expiry time for those acting as official secondaries from 30 days to
24 hours. This means that if they have any form of outage lasting 24 hours or
longwer, the whole “pg” domain goes off the air, crippling Internet in the
country.

I have no idea why they have made this decision - you would have
to ask them.

As a result, all DNS in country has had a raft of problems
today. 
After much consideration, and reviewing the lack of other options,
Telikom operational staff have decided that in the public interest we have to
temporarily ignore the instructions from the designated maintainers of the “pg”
domain and answer queries as per old information.

Conclusion:

There are times when I wander how the hell anything works in this place!!