directors of Snappy Designs. I asked them to post here but they have

declined (I reckon because they can’t get in touch with their PR

1. The reason it’s unavailable *is* a hardware fault with the

interface to the outside world. The gentleman I discussed the

situation with isn’t an IP engineer so was unable to give me solid

details on how it’s failed but if I can be of assistance in getting it

back up I will be - sadly the old Cisco 4000 series in my garage won’t

cut the mustard with at least a partial routemap! The router is

intentionally powered down which could mean anything from a router

failure to a cabling fault.

2. Snappy Designs is solvent - and they’re injecting more cash into it

to sort out Printshop and the rest. At that point (apparently) the

Printshop system will change somewhat and be more “automatic”. I don’t

have any more on that so please don’t ask me for further details.

3. There is a plan to give Plus/Premium users at least a fortnight

extension across the board.

4. It’s *hoped* that it will be back in the early hours of Monday

morning. I make that a 72-hour outage. I will keep track of what’s

going on and see if I can get further information tomorrow.

5. The architecture for Fotopic.net is still largely the same as when

we left in May. This means that when it comes back it should be mostly

OK - the image servers will probably take about 20 minutes to populate

their caches during which it’ll be a bit slower than usual. I have

volunteered to be on standby to help the engineers if required.

6. There will be a full statement going out to all Premium/Plus users

when it’s back, which will explain things. I did ask if they had any

plans to email their users prior to the recommencement of service but

there are no facilities to email upwards of 60,000 people without the

servers to handle it (which I can well believe, we have some

“interesting” issues emailing Yahoo people en-masse for instance). SD

said a statement will come pretty sharpish tho.

Fotopic.net, but please remember that myself and Nicky have been away

from the front-line since May (with the exception of assisting with

the odd support mail nobody else could answer, or when I’ve tried to

assist with things they didn’t understand yet). So please, please,

please, the “Mr Angry” emails have to stop or I’m going to have to put