Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to filceolaire and peteralway!! Hope it's a great one!

Waiting for Godot...

... or whatever the AT&T installer's name is. My window was 8am-5pm, so I can't formally gripe yet, but if he's not here by the time I post this I'll call Sonic and see if they know anything I don't. I have the DSL modem plugged in, with no sign of a signal.

( Wherein we find more geeky details about firewalls and routing. )

Speak of the devil...

...and his techs will appear. My shiny new DSL from sonic.net came on mere minutes after my previous post; the AT&T tech showed up about an hour later to test the line. There was a mysterious outage after I upgraded my service from one static IP address to eight -- apparently it took a while for something to propagate. But it's working fine now: speedtest.net says I'm getting 5175Mb/s downstream, and 656Kb/s upstream. That's a bit of a step up from 325Kb/s each way on the old link. So long, PacBell SBC AT&T!

Nobody showed up to install a "home run" or an outside splitter, but as it turned out I didn't need it. All my inside wiring goes through a single point,

Darned if I know what I'll do with 8 IPs -- one will be the main gateway and web server, some of them will get used to NAT some of my inside boxen, mainly so I can ssh to them directly, and some will get used for assorted web servers. Eventually I'll probably want some for ssl (https), since certificates are tied to IP addresses.

Is this thing on?

After a lot of jumping up and down and screaming, I appear to have a crude firewall (using Shorewall on my Debian laptop, which was conveniently at hand) on my new DSL line that I can route through. I can traceroute to google.com and read lj -- that's a good sign. Yes, it's faster. Much faster. Ship it.

Total debug time: about 4 hours. Apparently the Debian version of shorewall.conf is missing the crucial line:

  IP_FORWARDING=On

... so of course it wouldn't forward packets. Grump. There were a dozen or so other assorted things to fix in the example config, but that was the big one.

About the only other things I've done today was getting the assorted receipts organized for data entry, and taking a 2.5 mile walk.

Now I'll have to change the DNS entries for my assorted domains, and -- most importantly -- fix my mail configuration so that it will relay through sonic's mail server.