Will’s Blog

From Andrew Coates’ blog:

Aus-DotNet List moving Mail Servers
I just spoke to Dr Pete (Stanski), who runs the Aus-DotNet mailing list and, as per his note to the list a couple of days ago, he’s moved the list to a new ISP and a new server. It seems like the propagation of the MX record is taking longer than expected, but rest assured, there’ll be no requirement to resubscribe. It’ll all be “Seamless” as soon as the DNS system catches up.

On Monday Dr Pete wrote:

Hi Guys,

Yes. We’ve been experiencing a few problems with the mailing list.

The ISP we are using is running out of bandwidth on the server that we are hosting it – due to the size of the list.

During this week we shall be moving the list off to a new server and ISP so that we give you guys 100% uptime. If it all goes smoothly, you should not see any issues (i.e. no need for resubscribing). However, we will have to change the MX records to point to a new SMTP box so that might mean going off the air for about 1 day or so.

Sorry about the inconvenience over the last few days and last 3 weeks when the problems started. But the current ISP has not been the easiest to work with on this issue hence the migration to a different provider that can. Also since the Stanski.com MS Exchange server does not support mailing lists very well (Exchange feature request guys!) we had to find an ISP that could accommodate our mailing list needs. The good news is I think we have once – more details on this will be provided shortly.

Cheers

Peter

What i’m surprised about the most is that there wasn’t any bandwidth issues last year. Both years had quite heavy traffic. But on reflection, this years’ Friday topics had a bit more “bite” to them

Pretty amazing though, I think the list has been going now for over 3 years (I joined the list in 2002).

The first 5 emails I got from the list were all written by Dr Pete.

Here are the 5 subject titles:

[16/10/2002 6:58pm] 1. XML Spy for VS.NET
[17/10/2002 9:09am] 2. VS.NET six months on – Where are we now?
[17/10/2002 9:29pm] 3. Who needs an Xbox
[17/10/2002 5:42pm] 4. Yet another IDE for ASP.Net
[17/10/2002 6:33pm] 5. Yet another IDE for ASP.Net

As you can see, there was substantial quiet time in between the posts, which would be a bit of a rarity at times these days on the list (except for this current down time).

Just reading through some of the really old posts and I noticed Frank Arrigo‘s old email signature. Below is a comparison with a recent and the oldest one I could find (shortened them both a bit):

Date: Thursday, 31 October 2002 9:04 AM

frank arrigo

group manager, .NET ecosystem

http://microsoft.com/net

developer and platform strategy group

microsoft australia

Date: Thursday, 18 August 2005 10:47 AM

Frank Arrigo | Microsoft Pty | Group Manager | Developer Platform Evangelism
“Have you hugged a developer today?”

Interesting.

So “Developer and Platform Strategy Group” has been updated to “Developer Platform Evangelism” (DPE).

Pure lowercase has been replaced.

I like the “.NET ecosystem” part though. I reckon it should be used to describe the .NET community environment.

And from the archives in my inbox, it looks like the signature change occured sometime between October 2, 2003 and December 2, 2003.

Over the years I’ve learnt a lot from the list, and i’m sure others have too. I’ve answered a few questions, here and there. Been helped by others on the list. And have gotten to know a few of those on the list via the Melbourne .NET User Group.

Also realised there was a substantial amount of Dr Pete’s former students on there (especially during the early days).

Much thanks to Dr Pete for putting the list up and maintaining it over the years. Well done!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 11:40 pm and is filed under .NET, Australian Blogosphere, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.