Category: Web Hosting

OpenBSD 3.8

OpenBSDI’ve been playing with OpenBSD again … This time I hope to get further … When the FreeBSD firewall machine went down, I created a brand new one using FreeBSD 4.11 … I upgraded the sources to p13 … Almost immediately after, I received the notice that FreeBSD 6.0 was officially released, and a visit to their web site showed that there is no more FreeBSD 4.11 …

I started building an OpenBSD firewall, but gave up pretty quickly since it wasn’t comfortable … It didn’t feel like FreeBSD, so then I started working on a FreeBSD 6.0 solution which has ported a lot of OpenBSD features over … I have been running into some walls there, so I decided I would try OpenBSD again and see just how far I could get even though it doesn’t have conveniences that I’m used to … I’ll keep this bLog posted with what goes on … It’s just starting …

It’s been hell!

My weekend with Octane ended on Sunday morning … I got home about 6am from The Ocean Drive … I left to go there about 10:30am Saturday morning … That was after getting home from Reed’s at about 6am Saturday morning … So that’s what, 4.5 hours shy of 24 hours for The Ocean Drive job on about 3 hours of sleep … sheesh … Sunday was pretty much slept away … So I come down to the computers Monday, and during the course of the day I’m hearing “dink” … “dink” … “clunk” … If you’ve ever heard an IDE drive going south, this is that noise … I had two 40G WD drives in my personal workstation … The original 40 that filled up using W2K and the new one with XP on it that was pretty much full too … How can I tell which drive is dinking and clunking? I run the ol’ chkdisk and determine that it’s the newer of the two drives … The dinking and clunking gets worse, so what do I do? Turn the machine off … Have to get another drive in there and get the data off before it goes away for good …

I get this brainstorm that I ought to just get a new computer … My personal workstation has been a P3 1gHz for a couple years now, so it’s time I should go to a P4 for myself … I’m worth it … So I go to another machine and browse Circuit City’s web site to see if they have any spiffy deals on desktop computers … While I am browsing, I get the message that Firefox can’t find circuitcity.com … I refresh … I force a server refresh (Shift+F5) … It can’t find the site … Hmm … I look to the router … Stuff is trying to go out, but nothing is coming in … Aren’t LEDs awesome?! The phone rings … a guy from a band says he can’t get to his site and another that he knows I host … Yup, the connection is verklempt, I have to place a call … But, the support number is filed away nicely in my Email client in the Savvis folder, but my personal workstation was taking a dive, so I had turned it off … A reseller from the city calls … yes, I know … another reseller from West Chester calls … their customers are calling them, can I email when it’s back … yes, sure thing … (But I don’t have my email working now) … finally my oldest reseller calls and he wouldn’t have called me (cause he hates to bother me) but one of his $ clients called him …

I finally get the support number by firing up my clunky workstation … in loading the email client, it tried to get mail, but with the connection down, I can’t even communicate internally … I actually like this feature sometimes … I call them and they say they know and give me the Master Ticket Number for this issue since it is wide spread … It was ticket# 465020 if you’re interested … In total the connection was down from about 2-3pm … One tiny hour, but it was as if the world had ended … People go nuts without their Internet … I mean, I do too … Anyway, the explanation was that it was some sort of AT&T problem and they had to restart a device or something, but whatever, the connection was back … West Chester called me back and asked me if it was back for good … How can I answer that question? It could go down while I type this entry … I just have to trust that it stays up 24/7/365 … So I can only say that since it has been up more than 5 minutes, it seems they have cleared their problem …

So now back to getting me up and running again … I have an idea what Circuit City is selling so I go to my ol’ reliable local computer dealer and see what he has and can do for me … I usually go in there and buy the bare essentials and come home and piece something together from that … This time, I went full tilt with a complete system … DVD and a DVDRW … two DVDs in one machine … That’s like Surf & Turf for me … P4 2.6, 200G SATA (this new thing he thought I should check out) a pretty case and 1gig of RAM … I also picked up a couple spare power supplies (always need them) and a new optical mouse … The ball mouse that was in the KVM got dirty a lot and I have grown tired of cleaning it … Stupid dust … Everything else is on the motherboard … sound, vga, NIC … whatever … so I plunk $725 in his hand and I am off to install hell … Little did I know the hell that awaited me when I got home …

I pull up to the house and the wife comes running out … ‘You have to come inside right now!’ … okay, scare the crap out of me, what happened to one of the kids … who called … what is going on? Remember that kid who had his 3rd birthday back on October 10th last year? Well this same kid was allowed to go to the bathroom by himself … He flushed the toilet and somehow replayed the events of his birthday party … The same toilet overflowed and the water followed the same path down to, you guessed it, the SmartJack that brings the T1 connection into my location … She said she ran down when she realized what was happenning and felt the box, it was wet … She then said she heard it pop and sizzle … So I am on the phone to Savvis telling them that it’s the same exact thing that had happened 10/10/04 … Verizon has to come out and pop in a new card … Why didn’t they move that box? This time the phone only rang once … Another guy from a different band wanting to know why he couldn’t get to his site … I also got an email when I finally got to emails from a guy at like 11pm … I always kinda think the emails are funny cause you’d think if someone couldn’t get to their site that they might think that I couldn’t get emails … So I replied to this email and didn’t specifically place the blame on my 3 year old son … The pressure would certainly be too much on him …

So as I sit and wait, I figure I can begin the installation of the new machine and stuff … I have no Internet to get updates and stuff, but no matter … I now have the spiffy firewall in place where I am already protected from the nasties before I even install whatever operating system I choose … Since this is my workstation, I still use a lot of Windows based software, so this will be a Windows based machine … I have to complete hooking up the internal wires and things … The computer guy did most of the mounting of stuff … I had to hook up the LED wires … the external USB ports that are on the front of the box, etc … So I get it all together and boot it up … Setup goes through its normal startup and when I get to the part where I tell the installation to begin, it tells me there’s no hard drives to install Windows to … What?! Hmm … guess Windows doesn’t know about SATA when this was released … Okay, no problem, I will press F6 when the Setup begins and let it know with the SATA drivers … So, I do that and when I select to read the drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard, Setup informs me that I have no floppy drive to read the drivers in from … Uhm … I didn’t get a floppy drive cause I never use them anymore, and I have about 30 machines that have floppies in them that I didn’t need one in this new machine … Bah! Exit the setup again … so I figure I will go to Microsoft’s web site and look up how to install onto a new SATA HDD … Guess again, I have no Internet … So what to do? Screw it, I steal a 6G IDE out of another unused machine and decide to install the Op/Sys there and once up and running get the 200G up and running for storage … and that’s what I ended up doing …

Almost 7 hours after reporting my 3 year old’s adventures, Verizon shows up and I am running within 5 minutes … I asked the guy if I could cover the box or something and he said that would be fine … He didn’t seem into moving it or anything, so I will have a plastic bag covering that bad boy within 24 hours … Maybe some gaff tape with the plastic draped so anything will run off and I can leave the sides and bottom exposed … If I tuck it over, I think something may be able to get into the back of the unit, so I will create sort of like a gutter instead … This box is locked and I have no access to it at all … So there you have it, I knew it would only take 2 minutes to put that card in cause I knew what the problem was … Of course he had to go through his diagnostics and pinpoint the problem … It’s also always nice to have someone come in and admire my mess … It’s neat to watch someone else climb through all the boxes and crap that’s all over the place …

So I have the Internet, I begin Windows Update … While I update, I play some Counter-Strike to pass the time … I also moved some machines around since I was down and there was no one accessing them … Some of the machines that I recently developed, and when I say ‘recently’ I mean within the last year, I moved into more permanent spots and got them out of my way … I was also going to replace the firewall’s power supply, but it seems to have lost that rattling noise that it used to make … It was blowing air just fine so I will just keep an eye on that one … In the coming days I will re-vitalize the old Windows MySQL server into a new FreeBSD server with one of the new power supplies …

After all the updates are complete, I immediately go for the essentials … Firefox and I had always been meaning to switch from Eudora to Thunderbird, so here was my chance … got those both installed and working and I started getting the email accounts set up … I am using POP3SSL and SMTP-AUTH TLS for sending … all using the main hostname of the mail server … so far so good … I installed my CorelDRAW 12 upgrade, and it didn’t even ask me for an old disc … Weird … I know both DVD drives are working as I played Revolution-OS in there (a fitting first movie in this Windows machine) … I resurrected my brother’s old Creative Labs powered speakers for this machine … I decided I wanted better sound than the little cheapo speakers I’ve had on my workstation for some time … Already I am getting used to Thunderbird … I had over 350 messages to root from the BSD machines … No complaining from the Windows machines … I don’t think they even knew the Internet was unavailable …

A couple hours of sleep in my chair here, and I am back at it … Typing in this entry a reseller called for a new domain and asked about yesterday … They didn’t even realize the down time from last night … See, it only matters between 9 to 5 I guess … Although I am sure there were many puzzled faces during the outage last night … Right now the mail server is being converted to the SCSI drive that was installed almost a week ago … It spun in there just fine for that time, so now it’s ready to go into production … I also bought EditPadPro for the new machine … It was about time I got a registered version of that … It’s the best editor I have ever used, and I was getting tired of the slow response times of the older version … This new version is much better …

So! With the power outage from last week, and the AT&T outage coupled with my 3 year old’s potty training outage and my workstation’s hard disk crash, this has GOT to be it for a while, yes? I most certainly hope so …

Mail Server SCSI Install

Figured I couldn’t do any worse by installing the SCSI devices I got from eBay into the mail server at a mid-peak time … They had been sitting here since Monday and there was the power outage so I figured I would get them into the machine so work could begin transferring all the mail server data to it … The IDE will remain in the machine to serve as a backup/spare for the mail server’s files … While I went into it blindly not knowing whether there was anything on the drive, it all worked out … Worse case scenario would be that I would have booted into something I would or wouldn’t be familiar … Maybe even have gotten some free software? But that wasn’t the case … the mail server booted from the IDE and now PHPSysInfo displays the drive as being installed, just nothing on it yet …

New Forum

I have posted a forum application for use here on my site … If you’re interested in starting a little online community, please sign-up for the forums and begin to forge what is ours … The link to the forum is under the links section on the right … I like having web applications such as these, and maybe it will stimulate more of a conversation than what this bLog actually does or doesn’t do …

Mail Server

The mail server was upgraded the evening of 05-16-05 … a patch was put on the Qmail program for a certain solution one customer needed. At the same time, all other mail softwares were upgraded. After this was running for a day or two, it was noticed that intermittently there were password errors during the POPping of mail. My mail client is Eudora, and while it would generate an error, mail would be checked as usual in another 10 minutes without issue.

After looking into this error, other errors were noticed for other email accounts, but no one had emailed or mentioned anything. It was also realized that these errors were occuring before the upgrade of the server software, so a portion of the software was rolled back hoping that it was an issue with a new release increasing these errors. That was a little less than a week ago.

05/24/05 a reseller had called and explained the issue in a message. Being already aware of the problem, it was time to hanker down and fix it. This error does not appear on all servers running this exact same software. Changing the releases of the failing software corrected nothing. Then making sure everything was a matched release (MySQL client and server) did nothing to help as well. Changing the running of certain options within the software was changed. Some logging was turned off. Some monitoring was disabled. It seemed under heavy disk activity and CPU load the errors would generate, even though the CPU was not being taxed anywhere near its capacity. It was determined that the server has outgrown the IDE drive that spins happily inside it. This conclusion came 4 hours after diagnosing the problem began.

eBay was hit up for a new SCSI controller and 18.4G drive in the span of about a half hour and $108.60 put on the credit card. eBay is great! Then another thought came to mind, and that was to upgrade the operating system. The mail server has been running FreeBSD 4.10 for a good stable while now, but now we’re going to see if FreeBSD 4.11 solves this problem.

While it may be premature, as of this writing (05/25/05 9:10am) it seems the vchkpw is working okay, but pop3d-ssl is still having issues. My client was failing regularly every 10 minutes (I check mail every 10 minutes) … An upgrade of the Courier POP SSL software and this problem went away … There have been way less errors since these changes have been completed, but every once in a while (as before) this error creeps up … The authors of the software say it’s a known problem with no resolution in sight … The problem appears to be with MySQL … But there is no diagnostic information logged anywhere to determine the cause of the failure … It just seems that some people have this problem creep up …

Being that it seems that the error is replicated quite easily when you bang the disk, it is still assumed to be load related and still thought that it is the result of a consumer type HDD, so we’re going ahead with plans to replace the drive with a server type SCSI HDD … Those deliveries will be completed by June 3rd, so the Mail Server HDD upgrade will be done shortly after this hardware can be installed … If the errors don’t disappear as a result, I am going to set the computer on fire and laugh and laugh … WooHoo!

Busy, busy, busy

… as the magician with the rabbit would say … Happy Birthday! … uhm … well … yeah … I have been really busy lately … Lot of running around … Getting the truck fixed a couple times … finally today (yesterday) for good … but that required some errands that I don’t normally do … A trip to get the number off the side of the master cylinder … A trip to meet a guy there to verify that it was the master cylinder … A trip to put on the part when it came in to find out it wasn’t the right part after all … Then another trip to finally get the right one on …

My father had extreme system slow-down on his machine at his office … Didn’t know why … said everything was slow … After determining that it was just his system, tried to see how the machine itself was running … CPU didn’t look over taxed as well as plenty of memory being free … Hmm … So, I ping the server … time-outs … I ping the gateway … time-outs … Could it be the network card? The snow closed some places, so that day went wasted … The next day the place was closed due to illness so eventually stole a 3Com out of another machine in the office and stuck it in there … Vwahlah! It was the network card …

Development on http://www.lastmanband.com finally completed and launched about 24 hours ago … Everyone is happy … Development on several other sites continue … Some more important than others … Downloaded the database from my father’s web site and removed a ton of comment SPAM … An old ASP site I had done a long time ago … I’m sure it will fill up again … I should rewrite the site …

Watched Catwoman; The Day After Tomorrow; I, Robot; The Girl Next Door and The Village …

I may not have a job on Sundays anymore … the Whiskey Tango is looking to cut costs and if Brian Bortnick doesn’t play there anymore, they’re not going to replace him immediately with anything and they may just end up putting him in the front room like they do for the Monday night acoustic show … That will be a huge monthly pay cut for me … I guess it’s inevitable … unavoidable … a done deal … Brian is seeing if there may be a way to continue to utilize my services … either by helping with the small PA or by running another PA somewhere else should he go somewhere else … I guess I should do whatever comes along …

Cleaned up log files on the Windows servers … If there is more than 250 log files in a directory, the stats program will choke and sometimes cease to process … I thought it errored out, but it seemed like some sites past sites that had too many log files processed further than others … I don’t understand it … But I should switch to something that doesn’t have this restriction so it doesn’t choke … Also, some people are deleting their “/stats” directory, and that will error out as well … I am going to implement something on the FreeBSD side that handles all of this, but wouldn’t you know it again, there’s something that runs more efficiently on FreeBSD than it does on Windows … I hate to keep knocking the platform, but it happens time and time again that there is more efficiency on the FreeBSD side of things using software that costs nothing to procure … I’m sure there is something that has a decent price tag on it for Windows, and someone like me that needs to use it on many domains, there will be additional fees … *sigh* …

I think that brings me to current … I did buy some fabric at the fabric store to make pockets for Octane’s guitar cabinets as well as a cover for the monitor board … The fabric I bought was marine vinyl … Nothing too flowery … Just black …

Oh, and as I click the categories to file this post under (almost all of them) I remember that my Counter-Strike server died … again … This time I don’t really know why … I was getting ready to catch up with the old CS crew, and the guy says, “Is your server down?” … and I’m like I don’t think so, let me check … Sure enough, down … I look at the machine … No power … hmm? I then press the power button, nothing … I turn off the power switch in the back, then press power again … okay .. it’s on .. walk around to the monitor … Nothing again … hmm … same thing again … power off in back, power in front … I watch it .. it stays on .. hmm? Around to front … I see the thing booting and … boom! gone … The thing won’t stay on, so I think power supply? Who knows … I have to replace the thing and see if that does it …

Right next to it is a P3 that was the Windows MySQL server a while back … I finally put a power supply in that and stuck a 160G drive in there … Started to install FreeBSD 5.3 and I get drive errors … hmm? So then I think maybe it’s the version so I burn brand spanking new FreeBSD 4.11 … same sort of thing … hmm? Turns out the drive setting are what’s confusing it … So I go into the BIOS, select USER and it won’t let me specify the HDs Cyls and Tracks like all other BIOSes do … Then I start looking for BIOS upgrades, etc … didn’t find anything promising, so this machine sits … Now with this weird thing going on with the CS Server, I think I will do some swapping out of power supplies and drives and see if I can’t get the faster machine working with the larger drive and throw up another FreeBSD web server … One with quotas, and log management with stats … ooh, I am so excited!

Worth it?

A power outage lasting about six seconds screwed me today (well, yesterday) … It makes me think again about having a solution for this, and then thinking of the cost of not only acquiring this solution but providing it … Then maintaining it … Of course what I speak of is a UPS solution … I believe it would be thousands of dollars to have something that would keep these boxes running for a sustained length of time … In the case of the six second power outage, it certainly makes sense, but what if it were a half hour or an hour? To me it doesn’t seem cost effective in that I hadn’t had a power outage prior to October 10th last year for over a year … In fact, my one machine’s uptime was about four hundred seventy five days, and that was a machine installed way after the prior power outage … So October 10th to January 24th is a substantially shorter period of time … Will another one happen soon, or will another one happen in five hundred days? If at all? … So does it make sense for me to make this investment for the people that pay bottom dollar to host web sites to not be down for a little bit whenever the power goes out? Is anything so mission critical that there can be no interruption of service? For me, no. I don’t consider the availability of the Internet a huge priority in my life … This is not to downplay my enthusiasm for having a reliable connection though … In other words, should it be understandable the result of such an occurrence? … and the people that freak because they get an email fifteen minutes later than they should have should just go pound sand? I mean I guess if you were paying a substantial amount of money for that availability it would make sense, but I charge peanuts in comparison for like companies that provide all the bells and whistles … Some may disagree, but there are levels in which most people come into something … Where some may pay $5 for something, they have other people paying $50 for the exact same thing … In my case, this isn’t the case … So, I have to incur the costs and suck it up when people don’t pay when I expect they should, etc … I foot the bill all the time, and I do nothing but play “catch up” and most of the time, the people I let go simply screw me … I don’t let this get me, I guess if I did I would go crazy … But being that it’s more of a hobbyist mentality working with the machines and operating systems, I accept these losses however much they hurt me financially … I do expect when I am through my learning and experience process (which is obviously taking a long time) that I will eventually have all of these things automated in that I will simply let everything happen … I will open it wide up and expect nothing but revenue … Then I will upgrade the datacenter, upgrade the connection, upgrade the environment and eventually upgrade my status to “well off” … That would be a good thing, but for now, I sit and wonder if the money I feel I shouldn’t put out, or that I am saving by not providing a solution will do nothing but stifle my forward progress … I mean, if people become dissatisfied as a result of a power outage and deem it unacceptable, then they will go somewhere else … Then I don’t have the volume neccesary to move forward … I sincerely hope that the way I have been doing things warrants the understandability … I am open to the people that utilize this service (whether they choose to pass this information on is in some cases in their hands) … and I also feel that my innovation in the way that I accomplish things is far superior to some better known ISPs out there … Or, web hosting providers I guess I should say … I also try to be very detailed when asked about a certain situation by people … I think I may be becoming a little more vague on my hosting site, but still truthful … Those that know about this site sometimes get way more information than they bargained for … If it helps, great … If it hurts, I would hope people would tell me why …

Yeah … billing

I really gotta automate this thing … I ran the billing for December, and it’s what … December 31st … I really should automate the running of the billing … I am just going to run the billing tomorrow again for January … No payments to apply, etc … If they can automate a script to come into this here bLog and post a comment on every freakin post I’ve made in here, I should be able to automate the billing so it isn’t such a time constraint on me to have to sit down and make sure it’s right … To tell you how old the billing stuff is, it’s written in ASP … I have been writing in PHP for a couple years now … That’s one of the things I started but never got around to completing … So many others things jump up … Same goes for actually running the billing scripts … I have to make sure everything is applied before I run the scripts … and then the automating of people who have a web site one month and then don’t have one the next … Ugh! I definitely have to get some of these projects done that I started … I probably would have had more time if I weren’t deleting all these STUPID comments that this thing is spamming me with … Referral SPAM … the NEW SPAM … sucks … Oh well, off to the New Year’s gig … heck of a drive … Hopefully the new year will be less stressful for me with more time to accomplish all the things that I want to accomplish … Wishful thinking I suppose, especially in this crazy world we live in where everything is immediate … There’s no waiting anymore … Anyway … Happy New Year!

A big down …

One of the downs I guess I neglected to mention last entry is when your connection goes down, or the power goes down … I had the worst Internet day of my life yesterday … I got home from an excellent Saturday night at Bootleggers, probably around 5AM or so … The PA was loud and the band sounded awesome … Incredibly full sound packed with a punch that I haven’t heard much at Bootleggers … I think that’s cause I really haven’t ever turned it up that loud there cause I never have been allowed to … New owners, new attitude … There was a wet T-shirt contest in between the 2nd and 3rd sets, and by the time they wrapped that up, Octane didn’t start playing until 1:45 … They played until 2:10 … Breakin the law, breakin the law … Did I say it was loud? Awesome …

But I digress, so I do my normal channel flipping cause I fall asleep to the TV all the time … The TV drowns out my tinitus … So I get engrossed in this movie with Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley about some chick that lost her house and ol’ Ben moved in … That ends, and the screen shows that The Man Without a Face is coming on next … So, I have to watch that … It’s a great movie … Should buy the DVD … So the credits are rolling, and poof, the power goes out, for like a second … Damn, first thing that shoots through my mind is the computers and how I haven’t had a power loss for over a year and a half or more …

This fries the power supply in the main Windows Server, the domain controller … I am very tired now … I didn’t expect to last through two movies and then have a power outage requiring my attention … So I am going to send the wife up to CompUSA to purchase a power supply … I remember looking at the clock to see if they were open, and as I recall they were, so maybe this was around 9:30? Heck, I have logs … hang on a sec … Okay, here’s the story … The power dropped at 9:20AM … I could tell she wasn’t too excited about this, so I figured I would molest another machine and go buy replacements later … (I have another machine allocated to Windows that needs a power supply as well, so I should pick up 3 or 4 of them) … So I replace the power supply, and bring up the Windows server at 10:02 … I am poking around on there, and boom! 10:11 the power goes out again … It’s out this time for about 30 minutes …

Once I get everything synched back up again, I can’t bring up my own web site, I can’t bring up any other site except for the ICUHost.Net site … So I figure this is some sort of DNS issue since the only zone in my local Active Directory enabled DNS is the ICUHost.Net domain … I see activity through the firewall that millions of HTTP hits have gone through, so I know things are working okay from the outside, I just can’t get around … I put my FreeBSD name server as a secondary in the Windows configuration and sies started coming up for me … So, okay, I have some sort of internal DNS issue, but I don’t necessarily know why, so I figure I will leave it until later … Everything seems to be working for the people outside, and that’s all that matters … We were having people over for the 3 year old’s birthday, and I hadn’t gotten any sleep yet … The wife called and delayed the invites another hour to allow for this … When she came to me and said people were there, I mosied to another sleeping location and got another hour basically …

I came down and checked out the machines … I logged into all the others that I hadn’t logged into yet … I brought up the game servers and their streaming log file applications that produced the web displays and log capturing for stats … Just brought up more things that are normally running that I didn’t fire up earlier cause I wanted sleep … So back upstairs to the house fulla people celebrating the little guy’s birthday …

Then the phone rings and the wife answers it and it’s a reseller who cain’t FTP … I do preliminary help, and nothing is resolved so I stick him on hold and head down the steps to the dungeon I call home … I browse around and I can’t figure out why he can’t FTP … The service is running, I see his connection with netstat … It’s just not making sense to me … While he’s on the phone, he has company show up, so we both decide that I will look at it later and get back to him when I think I know what’s going on with this issue … No one else had called, so I wasn’t entirely sure if it was all on my end … I supposed it was though … So I go back upstairs … The wife also informs me that someone overflowed the toilet … as I noticed this when the top of the kitchen stairs were wet … Sheesh …

As I am sitting there with this going through my mind, I start to think that maybe I never saved the router config when I applied ACLs to it, and maybe that when the power went out it cycled an old configuration that had these problems in it … and that was probably also the reason that I was having internal/external surfing issues … Those were the symptoms I had had when I initially started trying to lock out the baddies working on the router ACLs … So at the optimum time I head back downstairs to apply this theory … I find the files I was using to go through these changes, and I find the most recent ACL text file that I have and I apply that to the router … I go over to the syslog and I see in it that the Serial Interface changed state to down, and I saw that the Internet activity LED that is normally pretty much solid is off … and I’m thinking that the Serial Interface never was taken down when I went in to configure the router … Weird … So I hop back over to HyperTerminal and exit from the router … Still no Internet light … Hmmm … so I go around to the other side and check out the CSU/DSU lights and sure enough there is that little amber guy staring at me … “AL” … Alarm … My connection is down … No! Not what I think it is …

Yes, the toilet juice ran down through the floor and was all over the T1 connection box … drips of water hanging from the bottom … I probably turned red … I was livid … There was everybody upstairs, and with the problems I had already had today, my T1 is screwed up cause someone used too much toilet tissue … 2 floors away! I pick up the intercom and get the wife’s attention … She doesn’t pick up, and I’m not about to broadcast my concerns to all those present … So I hung up and called the home phone, she answered and said she heard me, and I said slowly through my teeth, “Bring me the hair dryer” … She says, “you’re kidding” like she knows why … After a wait much longer than I expected, I became more .. uhm .. upset I guess … So she finally shows up, and I simply don’t say a word, plug in the hair dryer and point it at the device that I have no knowledge of … For one thing, it’s locked … I can’t get into it … So I blow hot air into the vents thinking that maybe something will dry out and miraculously I will have an Internet connection again … After 5 or 10 minutes of this, and no result, I give up and call for service …

The guy takes my number down, etc … asks me when I am available at this number, etc and I’m like 24 hours a day … and asking what hours are tomorrow etc, and I’m like … ‘This is the location, we’re here now and through the night, we will be here for the guy whenever the guy shows up’ … So I think I conveyed my desire to have ASAP service … Especially after I expressed my concern that someone wouldn’t be out tonight to fix this … That was probably the clue, and he said he would call and see what could be done and get back to me … So, nothing else I could do, I went upstairs waiting for the phone to ring … I had to leave for the Tango to go to work in a short while … I told the wife that when the phone rang her answers were “yes” and “anytime, right now is good” … I was just sitting there at the dinig room table clutching my coffee mug ever so tightly … My father came over and asked me questions and stuff … But he didn’t know what was up with the thing, etc (he’s not a computer genius like myself) so I snapped “I don’t really wanna talk about this right now” and he walked away … I felt bad, but it was the truth … So I figured I would just go to work … After all, there was alcohol there …

The wife called at 10:30 and said that the technician will come out when the sun comes up, whenever that is … They prefer to work during the light hours … I thought that was completely odd … When I got home she said that Savvis had called around 3AM and said the guy would be here at 8AM … He didn’t show til about 8:40 (the bastard) … It was fixed in about 20 minutes … Down for about 12 hours …

Of course at this point I already know that anyone who hosts through me is already searching for a new host … I mean, I would, so I can’t blame anyone for feeling that way … For me, I don’t sweat the downtime … I don’t think anything is that important … I am dissatisfied at the response time … I will certainly be looking into that further … I pay a huge chunk of change per month … I think the service should reflect that … I don’t charge people a lot that host through me though, and I give no limitations on anyone except for disk space … I sent a way less stuffed shirt email to everyone who hosts through me and so far the response has been good … On the other hand, besides demanding that my host remain available 24/7 with backups out the B-hind, I can appreciate that before this outage (that was explained in graphic detail) that there was an uptmie of over a year … What did someone actually miss? Email delayed, another offensive guest book entry? It’s like what my wife and I did one power outage … We played cards … We don’t ever play cards … but then again, she doesn’t read email … But cards, not even for clothes or anything … Strip Gin is a thing of the past … We’re grandparents now, you know … I just hope people understand what went down … How and why, and that 12 hours is nothing compared to the 19, 680 some odd hours before that since June 28, 2002 …

Crawling from the wreckage

Besides being a pretty cool song, it describes the network after Tuesday night … There is a site hosted here by a reseller and my policy is to not expose sites that are hosted here to anyone. But, this site brought the network close to its knees Tuesday night. I have heard on The Howard Stern show about him mentioning a web address and the traffic created shuts down the server (it simply congests the connection) but access to the site becomes almost impossible … For the first time ever, this happened here except the web address was mentioned on National Television … The site was mentioned Tuesday night on The Late Show with David Letterman … I guess the guy who resells this site would want to promote the site even though it’s resold, so he could comment here if he reads this … but I sorta wanted a heads up to those people who host through me what had happened this past Tuesday night and the following days … Wednesday it was still pretty busy and fell off a bit Thursday … We’ll see what happens come later today … I think the initial traffic Tuesday night was people simply hitting the site, but the following days they had posted the video (streaming) of the appearance and that was probably killing the connection as well … While it’s a shame that it slammed the connection, it’s pretty cool that it happened … In a weird way, eh?