On Friday 11th February, a bug that had been affecting a number of peers across NSW-IX was identified. To resolve this issue, our engineers initiated an emergency outage across the entire IX to resolve the issue permanently, and prior to the outage, conducted an emergency reboot and firmware upgrade on the affected switch.  

The firmware upgrade, in addition to resolving this bug (outlined on our status page), will be progressively rolled out to all exchanges to bring them in sync in preparation for our new portal’s automation platform.  

Our engineers applied new firmware to WA-IX to resolve a software bug – the switch located in QV1 (pe3.pe1) and NextDC P1 (pe2.pe5). The latest version has been tested in our lab and verified for deployment. This is the first of many firmware upgrades that will be progressively rolled out across all the IXes, as we prepare for automation and standardise the firmware across our hardware.

This year marks 25 years of WA-IX. As many of you know, our first Point of Presence (PoP) was located in the basement of QV1 and is still part of our network today. The action of creating the first PoP was described by Michael Malone – president of WAIA in 1997 – as “a laudable display of cooperation between competitors.”

First conceived in 1996 at a time when most people were using the wholesalers of the day: AARNet, connect.com.au or Access1, the traffic was very costly both internationally and locally ($1.46 per MB sent and received). Those who were part of WAIA at the time generally agreed that an IX was a great idea and that a neutral peering point made a lot of sense.

The first PoP comprised donated hardware from iiNet with engineers from iiNet, Wantree and Omen jointly managing it on a volunteer basis. Since then, our network has expanded significantly, and we now have more than 30 PoPs nationally.

A snippet from the original press release, “As of about half an hour ago, iiNet and Omen are the first two networks peering at the WA Internet Exchange. […] Wantree and Paradox digital expect to be connected to the peering point within a week, and PARNet (the four public universities and CSIRO) should be on by mid-July” – Michael Malone, 1997. Read the full version of the 1997 press release.

It was with much sadness that our team farewelled Washif Ahmed, who joined Ausgrid as a Network Engineer. Washif joined us in 2019 and has been an asset to our technical team right from the outset. His caring and kind nature, fantastic work ethic, knowledge, skills and abilities and funny memes will be greatly missed. We wish him all the best with his future career.