First the bad: My VFX line died on Friday and after much server rebooting and many arguments with the command line I decided to try ringing it from my mobile. Things we're not looking good; instead of forwarding to my mobile as it should I got a "Number out of service" announcement. This indicated to me that it was probably a VFX issue so I emailed the XNet helpdesk. From 7:30pm Friday until 1:30pm Monday I didn't hear a thing, not even an acknowledgement of my email, so I decided to give them a ring. The Tech Support guy informed me that my entire package had been cancelled, but he didn't know why. As my broadband seemed to be working he thought it was probably a mistake. He said he would need to speak to the provisioning team and get back to me :-(
Then some good: An hour later the tech rang back and said everything had been reinstated. After reconfiguring Asterisk with the new username/password everything was working again. I had feared the re-provision would take days and the guy wouldn't ever ring me back, but despite the initial lack of email assistance and the balls-up with the account I was pleasantly suprised by XNet's response - I got through on the phone within a minute of ringing and the re-provisioning and ringback were all inside an hour :-)
Now the interesting: The email I received with my Asterisk details had an interesting difference from everything I've read on this forum... the server is no longer as.wxcnz.net, it's now: pan.wxnz.net it still seems to resolve to the same IP, but the DNS seems to be working, so it doesn't look like we need to use the hosts files any more. Can anyone else confirm this? Maybe it's time to update the instructions in the "Getting Started" posts?