Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the year's first set of Birthday Triplets on my flist: sandy_tyras, cadhla, and idea_fairy!!!!!!! Have a great one!!!!

That's a grand total for the day of three hippos, three birdies, and six ewes. No I'm not keeping running totals for the year.

And the loser is...

... the DSL modem. In spite of the fact that all the lights are on and doing the right thing, it apparently died in some subtle way during the last power glitch. Plugged the line into the other DSL modem, and it came right up.

That, of course, was something I should have thought of yesterday morning. As in, before I went to Fry's.

Dumb bear.

The Alcatel modem is really old and almost certainly won't handle the new 6MB/Sec line, so I'd have to get a new one even if I didn't still need both lines. But...

Further adventures in family computing

... so this morning I took advantage of the fact that installing the new UPS required me to power down the entire bloody rack to re-route a few cables and to reconfigure the "interim" gateway machine that had been my main DSL router since last April when I installed it, and make it the "interim" gateway for the old DSL line. Pretty simple; I took down the mail server because I wanted to be around when I turned it on in case it didn't work. Good thing -- there are still some pieces of configuration that have to be changed. Like the hostname? Little things like that.

I left the old gateway turned off; the final uptime was 603 days. It will eventually become the main gateway.

At that point, I headed out to Fry's to get a new DSL modem. They had a D-Link for $50. Stopped at Sears on the way home for vacuum cleaner bags; by the time I got home it was raining hard.

One of my Linux laptops, Argo, is currently the interim gateway for the DSL line. It's taken me about the last 3 hours and a support call to get the bloody D-Link configured: apparently it's not really smart enough to come up in bridge mode by itself. That's going to keep causing me trouble, I suspect. (Come to think of it, my old modem probably just needed a reset...) (Never hurts to have a spare, though.)

I also picked up a cheap ($15) 5-port ethernet switch for the Y.D.; she's been complaining about slow wireless connections on her laptop. Part of that, and I suspect a lot of other network flakiness, was almost certainly due to the fact that the boneheaded family sysadmin (yours truly, of course) had the same gateway IP addresses configured on both routers. Probably never would have discovered it if the Y.D. hadn't told me she had an internet connection at a time yesterday when I knew that the main DSL line was down.

My shiny UPS (APC BX1500LCD) is currently showing a 17% load, and an estimated run time of 34 minutes. This makes me happy. I'd be even happier, presumably, if I didn't have as many machines running in the rack. I'm getting there...

Next in line for configuration are mail on the old gateway, DNS and possibly web on the interim gateway, and a re-install from scratch on the new gateway. Which will have four ethernet ports -- Whee!

update: 17:34 ...and a couple of firewall fixes later, mail is back up. Some messages may have been lost between early this morning and now; I sometimes wonder about forwarding. I *really* need to fix email. But not today.