Telecom plays it cagey on internal network glitch

By Chris Barton

Telecom staff got a taste of what life might be like without computers last week when a glitch in their internal network forced them to revert to manual, paper-based processes.

Telecom spokesperson Glen Sowry was cagey about what caused the problem saying it resulted from a "routine software change." He was also vague about the extent of the glitch saying only that it affected "different people at different times."

The Business Herald understands the error, which began on Wednesday and wasn't resolved until yesterday morning, spread throughout the entire Telecom computer network disrupting the normal work practices of about 5000 staff.

Mr Sowry said reports some staff were sent home on Friday because of lack of access to the network were not true. Those that did have access troubles were advised to remain at work completing other tasks.

He stressed that the fault was internal and had "minimal external customer impact."

Novell New Zealand country manager Peter Revell said the company had responded to Telecom's request for help on an incident related to Novell Directory Services and that an engineer from Australia was flown in on Sunday morning to assist. He was adamant the problem was not due to a fault in the software.

Novell Directory Services is essentially a hierarchical database of all the objects on a network - computers, routers, people, programs and files - represented in a directory tree structure of categories and sub-categories.

A possible explanation for a fault of this magnitude is that there was some corruption or deletion of the Novell database - possibly from human error during the "routine software change" - and that backup procedures also failed.

Telecom's internal computer network has some 7000 connected PCs and 500 mobile computers.