GCom Internet - Current and Past News Items

Monday, October 13, 2008

Apache and PHP Upgrades - 14th October - 19th October

This item affects only clients using GCom's Australian hosting services. This does not affect GCom's Australian ISP access clients.

GCom Internet will be performing some major upgrades across all our Australian hosting servers over the period 14th October to 19th October. The most significant upgrades will include...

• Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2.9
• PHP5 remains at 5.2.6
• PHP4 upgrades from 4.4.8 to 4.4.9

With respect to the PHP upgrade and to PHP in general, we strongly recommend that all hosting clients make themselves familiar with the information provided in the following knowledge base article...

http://www.gcom.net.au/kb/201081.html

Monday, July 28, 2008

GCom Closed - 5th August - 18th August

GCom Internet's office will be closed for a period early next month from Tuesday, 5th August through to Monday, 18th August, with both dates being inclusive.

During that period, our office will be attended irregularly for security purposes only, while we're attending a USA based web hosting convention.

If you need support during this time, please just email and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

In cases of genuine emergency, or if you find you've run out of net time while we're away, a member of staff will remain contactable via our mobile at most times.

Our contact details are available at...

http://www.gcom.net.au/contact.html

Monday, June 02, 2008

Sydney Network Expansion - 4th June - 29th June

During the period from Wednesday 4th June through to Sunday 29th June, we will be bringing online a new server cluster within our Sydney network in the Global Switch data center. These servers are all Dell Quad Core Xeon based systems, and are being installed solely to handle the expansion of our web and email hosting operations.

The bandwidth we've allocated to these new servers is quite massive by Australian standards, and during the installation we'll be upgrading all our Australian clients currently hosted on our USA servers to this premium high speed Australian bandwidth. All accounts will retain their existing USA disk space and bandwidth allowances with no fee increase. Existing Australian hosted clients will have their account resources upgraded to match, again with no fee increase.

In completing the upgrade, a huge amount of data will need to be transmitted between USA and Sydney as websites, databases and email stores are transferred and loaded onto the new servers. The data is scheduled to be moved server by server in multiple stages. Each domain's SOA Minimum TTL will be reduced to 5 minutes immediately prior to the move, and increased again after the move has been verified to be successful. Interruption for your clients should be minimal to nil.

Monday, January 07, 2008

MySQL Upgrades - 9th January - 12th January

This item affects only clients using GCom's Australian and USA hosting services. This does not affect GCom's Australian ISP access clients.

GCom Internet will be performing an upgrade of MySQL from version 4.1.22 to 5.0.45 across all our Australian and USA hosting servers over the period 9th January to 12th January.

This process will require a downtime for all PHP and MySQL services of approximately 20 minutes on each server as the upgrade is performed. We will be performing the MySQL upgrades during the quietest time of day with respect to each server.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Apache and PHP Upgrades - 1st January - 9th January

This item affects only clients using GCom's Australian and USA hosting services. This does not affect GCom's Australian ISP access clients.

GCom Internet will be performing some major upgrades across all our Australian and USA hosting servers over the period 1st January to 9th January. The most significant upgrades will include...

• Apache 1.3.37 to Apache 2.0
• PHP4 to Concurrent PHP4 (4.4.8) and PHP5 (5.2.5)

With respect to the PHP upgrade, we strongly recommend that all hosting clients make themselves familiar with the information provided in the following knowledge base article...

http://www.gcom.net.au/kb/201081.html

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Have a Very Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year to all our Graaf, GCom and Zippy Hosting clients. Thank you for your wonderful support during 2007.

We'll be out of the office on 25th and 26th December, as well as 1st January. For all other days over the Christmas period, we'll be on board in a relaxed kind of way.

Please keep yourselves and your families safe over the break. We look forward to seeing you in 2008.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Sydney PDU Upgrades - 25th, 30th & 31st October

This item affects only clients using GCom's Australian services. This does not affect any of GCom's USA services.

On 25th, 30th and 31st October, our Sydney data center will be performing an upgrade of all power distribution units (PDU's). This is a necessary upgrade and will affect a number of our servers.

Please expect a service interruption starting at around 10am on Thursday, 25th October for a period of between 10 and 20 minutes.

A possible additional outage may also occur on 30th or 31st October for a period of anywhere between 10 and 60 minutes. However, depending on the success of the first upgrade stage, this follow up outage is unlikely. The exact timing of such a possible interruption will not be known in advance.

Affected servers include...

• Arex, Chekov, Farscape, Stargate, Sulu

Affected services include...

• DNS Resolution (USA secondary servers will cover)
• ISP Authentication (Australian secondary servers will cover)
• Australian Email (All transactions will be queued)
• Australian Hosting (Services will be unavailable)

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

CPanel 11 Upgrades - 16th August - 26th August

A major upgrade to the CPanel web hosting platform has been released today as a stable product, and GCom Internet will be upgrading all our Australian and USA CPanel hosting servers over the next 10 days.

End users will see a vastly modified and improved interface to their hosting servers. Only clients with hosted domain servers will see any changes.

Further details related to the new CPanel 11 features are available here.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

New Website Design

GCom Internet's new website design has come online.

Apart from the cosmetic changes, the new site has been built primarily to enable greater integration of our backend ordering, accounting and management software. The new design will greatly simplify the merging of  the Zippy Hosting email and web hosting operations into the main GCom Internet system.

Over the next few days, ordering and payment modules for both Zippy Hosting and GCom Internet clients will be consolidated via a single backend database, all under the GCom Internet label.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Windows Defender Errors

Since the new year, we've been receiving many support requests from users related to Windows Defender errors encountered on boot up. The technical field staff from Nifty Computing have advised that the issue is related to an upgrade of the base application which must be applied to the target system.

To correct the fault, simply uninstall the existing installation of Windows Defender via the "Add / Remove Programs" applet from within your Control Panel, reboot your system, and then download and install the current version of the software from the Windows Defender Homepage.

Monday, July 31, 2006

Microsoft FrontPage - End of Life

Microsoft have now officially terminated their FrontPage web development product. GCom Internet will continue to provide legacy support for FrontPage Extensions on our public hosting servers for only so long as such provision does not conflict with any other server applications. At this stage, we are setting December, 2006 as the advised target date for end users to work around any reliance on the discontinued product.

While we will no longer advertise Microsoft FrontPage as a feature of our hosting plans, we will allow the product to run on our servers until we encounter any security or compatibility issues.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Reduced Internet Access Pricing

GCom Internet is very happy to announce our new heavily reduced dialup and ISDN internet access rates. Our dialup and ISDN rates have dropped by close to 25% with our MaxiPlan unlimited monthly accounts reduced to $18.90, and HourSaver accounts down to 70c.

Full details are available via the Dialup Access and ISDN Access links.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Mail Settings and Antivirus Updates

A couple of the major antivirus packages appear to have been randomly scrambling end-users' email configurations with their latest updates. If you've recently updated your antivirus system, and you now find that your email software is asking you for your password when you try to send and/or receive your email, please just give us a call while you're sitting in front of the affected computer.

The support calls we've received so far relate only to CA/Vet and McAfee antivirus packages.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

We've Moved!

Graaf Computer Systems has a new home, with more office space and comfort, just down the road at 155 Barker Street, Castlemaine. All other contact details remain unchanged, and can be found via our Contact Details link in the main menu.

155 Barker Street is the Orientel Chambers building, right between LMSW Lawyers and Family Videoland.

Monday, March 28, 2005

New Reduced Pricing Structure - Effective Friday 01.04.05

With the increase in our market share due to our move to national coverage, we're now able to work within a different economy of scale. Accordingly, we're very happy to announce our new reduced dialup and ISDN internet access rates which are effective from 01.04.05.

Full details are available via the Dialup Access and ISDN Access links in the menu systems.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Anti-Spam System Upgrade

We have recently upgraded our Australian mail servers to incorporate the latest Spam Assassin release. It's a self training and learing anti-spam system and we're finding it extremely efficient.

For full details on the operation of the system for your email accounts, please take a look in the GCom Knowledge Base  here.

If you're interested in the Spam Assassin project itself, you can find all the interesting details here.

Sunday, July 04, 2004

Important - New Australia Wide Settings

If you have not yet done so, it is now fairly urgent that you check your GCom mailbox and follow the instructions contained in two emails sent to you regarding our new Australia wide dialup number and a simple modification required to your email settings.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Happy Surfing,

Leo Julius

Graaf Computer Systems / GCom Internet