Ray White loses mail due to AAPT outage

Real estate giant Ray White's email systems went down this week after its Active Directory installation couldn't communicate with the rest of the world courtesy of an AAPT outage.

An AAPT link within the company's head office in a Riverside building in Brisbane had gone down, Ray White director of IT & property management Ben White said, meaning its Active Directory installation could not communicate with the main datacentre in Fortitude Valley, let alone Google's global systems hosted overseas. The organisation is partway through migrating to the Google platform.

The situation had arisen from a quirk of network design history at Ray White, which sees its telecommunications systems routed through its Brisbane office, with White citing one proprietary cable — "the last metre of connection between [Ray White] servers and the internet" — as the problem.

AAPT warned customers yesterday that a number of its Brisbane sites were under threat.

"Their whole node is destroyed and they have to rebuild the whole node somewhere else," said White today. "There's no answer on how long it will take."

The Active Directory installation, the executive said, was a legacy system used not only for authenticating users with Ray White's email platforms, but also with other property systems. "It has tentacles into all sorts of things," he said.

To resolve the situation, which is keeping Ray White staff nationally from accessing their email, White said the company's technicians were currently working on potential solutions.

The first, he said, would see AAPT resolve its network issues. The second would see Ray White switch to a different telco. Currently, the company is negotiating with Optus. Normally getting a new connection of this type would take between two and three weeks, White said, Optus was promising a resolution within the next day or so.

But there was one final option: White said his company was also considering switching from Active Directory and letting staff log-in to Google Apps directly.