What Fun!
15 days of such fun and games. Maybe the next time something this
drastic occurs I'll just go ahead, power down the servers and take up
bowling or something.
Here's a short history of what happened. Way back on
Friday, Feb. 16th, I was down at Bailey's working on various
things. Took a minute to sit down and do some computer work,
tried to grab a file over the net from one of the boxes at home.
I got a strange error, didn't worry too much about it, went back to car
stuff thinking I'd deal with the computer error that evening when I got
home. Sure, no sweat.
Basically I no longer had a network. No connection to the world
beyond my dark and dreary basement. I tried a few things, called
Qwest about my DSL line status. They said the line looked fine, I
should call my ISP, ArosNet. Something similar happened back on
January 7th, but the network came back online in about 10 hours.
So I didn't worry too much, watched some late night TV and went to bed.
Morning of the 17th, a fine, sunny saturday, a great start to a holiday
weekend. Well, for some. I spent mine trying to figure out
what was going on and making unsuccessful attempts to contact my
ISP. Actually, that continued for several days. Their
office is just a few blocks from my house, I even stopped by to see if
anyone was around. The place looked deserted, which seemed normal
for a holiday weekend. Tuesday morning my wife mentions to me
there's an article about ArosNet in the paper. Turns out they
moved their office and claim that Qwest turned off service to the old
equipment before they turned on the new stuff. Aros claimed
they'd be back on the air soon. Right. Days go by, still no
network, still not able to connect to their support phone
system. There's a lot more involved in their move than
meets the eye, it appears. The new address listed in the
newspaper was a fabric store. Hmmm......
At one point I called the ISP support number and got through instead of
getting the "You call cannot be completed due to network error" I
made the call at 8:12 am, and the automated system informed me I was
number 24 of callers waiting to speak to a representative. So I
sat at the computer doing what little I could, listening to the little
voice coming on every few minutes to update me on my
position. At 11:11 am, I'm up to number 8. At 11:45,
number 7. And stay there for some time. Guess the
person answering went to lunch. 1:42 pm, number 6. Finally,
at 1:59 pm, nearly SIX hours on hold, I get through - to an answering
machine!!! Luckily my wife wasn't home to hear what I was
saying. I was not a happy camper. Over the course of the
week I occasionally did get some sort of service. At one point my
trusty old Cisco 678 DSL modem booted up with a new block of IP
addresses. I fussed around and sort of got connected using those,
and sent out that message from host-90.pl10blah-blah that some of you
may remember. Still tried to give Aros a chance to make things
right. It didn't happen.
Suffice it to say I decided to switch providers. It
took several days from the time I actually ordered the
change in service from Qwest to have a working network and
another block of static IP addresses. And things are starting to
come together, though still several glitches on various fronts.
During the downtime I decided to shuffle some hardware around, update
some software and make various other changes. So some of the
delays over the last day or two are my fault, not Aros or Qwest.
One good thing is that at the moment the main Team.Net server is better
than it was. You may remember the last major service interruption
back around Thanksgiving when I had a hardware meltdown and cobbled up
a system to get on the air again. The current server has over
twice the memory and about 4 times the CPU speed of that box, so
hopefully we'll see better service and fewer dropped emails once things
settle down. At least I hope I get to relax someday soon!
Well, there's still about 10 more domains I need to get back on the
air. Then I'll get a chance to kick back and savor a nice, tasty
barley beverage!
Our annual Beach Party on Feb. 24th was a nice chance to relax, but
still pretty stressful due to all this computer nonsense. Maybe
St. Patrick's Day will be calmer.
SL Tribune 1
SL Tribune 2
SL Tribune 3
mjb.
Last Edit: 04-Mar-07
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