[ct-user] ve7tcp system problems

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

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

--
Submissions:              ct-user@ve7tcp.ampr.org
Administrative requests:  ct-user-REQUEST@ve7tcp.ampr.org
WWW:                      http://www.ve7tcp.ampr.org/Software/ct
Questions:                owner-ct-user@ve7tcp.ampr.org