As you've probably noticed, connectivity to ve7tcp.ampr.org has
been sporadic this week. Here's what happened ...
* Tuesday July 1 was a national holiday here (Canada Day), and we
closed down the office for both Monday and Tuesday.
* Monday morning the disk in our firewall packed it in, taking us
off the Internet.
* On Wednesday I was able to get the firewall running just long enough
to download the software to install on the replacement firewall I
was building. Unfortunately the replacement machine required a BIOS
upgrade. Even more unfortunately, I needed the Internet connection
to download the new BIOS image. This presented a bootstrapping
problem, since I needed the not-yet-running firewall to be running
in order to get the software required to get the firewall running ...
* Fortunately I just recently had a 10 Mb/s Internet connection
installed at home (cable modems are way too cool :-) so the
new firewall came home Wednesday night where I did the BIOS
upgrade.
* Thursday noon saw the new firewall up and running.
* Just as the firewall went back into production, one of the disks
on ve7tcp.ampr.org started throwing hard errors. So, just as
the box came up, it went back down, and a badblock scan was
done on the offending drive. Machine comes up a few hours
later.
* Things are finally working again, right? Wishful thinking. Thursday
afternoon our Internet provider calls and says they are ready to
cut us over to their new router (they are switching upstream
providers). "Are you sure you have the BGP routing announcements
set up properly?" sez I. "You betcha!" they reply. We cut over,
and things appear to be working okay.
* Last night I decide to log in from home. Funny, I can't get past
the firewall. Come to work this morning to find a hanging party
waiting for me at the door. After a little investigation I discover
that our Internet provider has in fact buggered up the routing
tables. Fortunately I was able to work around the problem on
this end, so we're finally back up and running.
It's been a *long* week :-)
--lyndon
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