The Mandelbear's Musings

... 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.

With the Fiancé (selkit) coming down soon from the frozen North for an extended stay with the Wolfling, the question of upgrading our miserable 384Kb/s DSL line once again comes up, this time with some urgency.

OK, so I seem to have convinced myself that Sonic is the way to go. So the main choices are:

1. Switch to Sonic on my existing DSL line and take my chances with how long I'm without service during the transition.
2. Add Sonic on my primary line, then drop the secondary. Take my chances on how long it would take, including the possibility of AT&T putting roadblocks in the way like they did last time. Smoothest transition -- only one DNS change.

Any advice? There are additional questions, like how to bridge my email and locally-hosted websites if I go with option 1. But we'll go with this one basic choice for now.

I really don't have the time to be messing with this, but that's another matter.