Maintenance Window:-
Friday 3rd August 8:00am-10:00am.

Service Affected:-
Usenet.

Duration of expected customer impact:-
Up to 24 hours.

Detailed description of work to be performed:-
We will be making some DNS configuration changes in order to point our news server addresses at the new Supernews servers. This work is being conducted following successful testing of the new news platform. Further details regarding this testing and the outsourcing of our Usenet feed can be found in the following Community Site blog post:
http://community.plus.net/comms/2007/07/23/new-usenet-platform-now-open-for-testing/

Expected customer impact:-
When the switch is made, customers will be automatically pointed to the new Supernews server. Due to the nature of DNS, this change may take up to 4 hours to come into effect. Customers using third party DNS server addresses may find the change takes up to 24 hours to propagate.

When the switch occurs, there is a possibility that customers' posting history will be lost and the posts in the groups customers have subscribed to may all become marked as unread. In some cases it may be necessary for customers to renew their group subscriptions.

Other Notes:-
The old platform will be accessible for a limited period of time using the IP address 84.92.1.10. It is likely that this server will be decommissioned at some point during the next two months.

Kind Regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support