*tap* *tap* is this thing on…

You (all 4 of you) may have noticed a little outage over the last few days. For whatever reason AT&T shutdown all of my ISP’s phone lines and this included their DSL lines. Since www.lectroid.net and www.sactraffic.org sit on a server in my closet, this meant they were offline. Oopsie.

Now I know s*** happens in technology but my ISP effectively went dark with only a single little blurb on their web site about their phones being out. No updates, no nothing and not even any mention of their DSL customers. Add to this, the alternate numbers they offered didn’t work. I seriously thought they might have gone out of business. Not really the behavior you want from an ISP.

So I went hunting for a new broadband provider. I’m in a semi-rual area so my options were limited, I was left with Comcast (my cable provider) and AT&T (my phone provider). Comcast was never a serious option for personal reasons so after a single, and rather pleasant, phone call to what turned out to be a call center in Texas, I’ll be getting 6 megs of DSL goodness directly from AT&T and installed on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to 4 times the bandwidth for even less than I was paying before.

This isn’t without some cost however. For almost 15 years I’ve used local ISPs for my internet service. Yeah, sometimes I paid a little more, but I liked being able to call (or IM) an admin directly if something wasn’t working and get it looked at, in fact I was often friends with them so I had the inside track. Oftentimes I was friends with the ISP owners as well. But the last guy I knew at my ISP, or at any ISP, left about 6 months ago, so it was time to move on.

The other change will be for the first time in almost 10 years I won’t have a fixed IP address, so I won’t be hosting my own stuff on a server in my closet. I’m still working out where the web server will go so you can expect another outage while I work that out (email, however, will be fine).

But 6 megs of DSL goodness…

As they say, this changes everything.

IMAP support means the wife and I can continue to use Apple’s Mail.app on our Macs just as before. Not only that but Mail.app really integrates well with GMail by allowing you to select which online folders to use for “Drafts”, “Trash”, “Sent” and “Junk”. Not only THAT but GMail’s IMAP supports SSL for both IMAP and authenticated sending. Just freakin’ awesome.

And of course GMail obviously offers a web interface meaning we can get our email from anywhere if need be – a feature I really didn’t have before.

Setting this up through Google Apps let me uninstall and stop worrying about Dovecot and procmail, turn off OpenBSD’s spamd, untweak all the sendmail.mc changes I’d made and close port 25 forever. For free.

Oh and as an added bonus you get GTalk and since I was running ejabberd for similar functionality that’s another set of software that went bye-bye. Did I mention for free.

Yeah, you get to wonder about privacy issues and you “only” get 4 gigs of space, but for the needs of a small home domain, these are total non-issues.

Next up… Google Calendar

In other words, with few lines of code I’ve been displaying information from people’s sites on my site all purdy like.

I love this. Because it means that with a little brain power I don’t have to be limited to the “badges” or whatever other canned widget frou-frou gunk that these sites provide. What’s also cool, it that with a little more brain power I suppose I could “mashup” all this data in some way I haven’t thought up yet, man how web-two-point-ohy is that, huh?

I also went and imported an experimental Blogspot blog I had set up to blather on semi-anonymously about newspaper technical issues, called “Journo-Geek”. As it became really clear that I couldn’t fill one blog with interesting crap let alone two, I decided to nuke “Journo-geek” and incorporate it’s content here. WordPress has a nice import feature that made it pretty simple. If you care about such things, the Mass Media category houses most of those posts.

I’d also been hiding non-flattering posts about my day-job behind a login wall. Technically this was a pain because the WordPress plugin I was using to enable this was dodgy and quite frankly, the idea of hiding commentary clashed with what limited personal mores I may have (“Be Open, Be Vocal; Stay Open, Stay Vocal“).

So I looked through all the offending posts and edited them for clarity (and perhaps a little dulling of the sharper edges) and opened them back up. I did wind up deleting one or two (seriously, they were stupid) and I decided to keep two posts locked away (marked them “private” in WordPress) due primarily to personal content (but I still wanted a record of them).

What can I say, even the best jobs suck on some days.

What is it about losing phone connections this week?

This meant that for my internet fix, I was reduced to GPRS access via a bluetooth connection to my mobile phone. You know how people are bitching because they say that iPhones are slow because of AT&T’s slow EDGE network? Well GPRS is the predecessor to EDGE, that’s right, it’s slower. And I don’t have a flat data rate either. Blech.

Anyway, my ISP actually called all their DSL customers because with their DSL down and their phone lines disconnected folks were calling and getting, “Doo Daa Deep – We’re sorry the number you have dialed has been disconnected…” which as you can imagine freaked a lot of people out.

(I knew what was up because I hit their status pages via GPRS )

Anyway, we’re back.

You may remember a while back I pontificated about using a 3rd party host for lectroid.net stuff. Well I looked around and finally just gave up on that idea. Face it, after five+ years of running my own stuff, 3rd party hosts suck by comparison.

But I did make some changes:

• I now have a separate Soekris based firewall/router – I was running the one-machine-does-everything approach, but now I can blow up my web server and still get on the ‘net to google for help.
• I killed most of my OpenBSD dev boxes – Ok, face it, I’m not porting much anymore, so it was time for the sparc64 and — yes — the vax to go.
• OpenBSD 4.1 install. No not an upgrade, a whole new install. After 10 or so OpenBSD upgrades on a web/mail server you collect a lot of cruft. Time to decruftify.
• Web/Email updates – Dovecot 1.0, WordPress 2.2 probably others.
• Web site cleanup – old stuff like my old javascript pages and such are finally gone. My OpenBSD ports pages too.

As I said, I only blew it twice. Yeah, once on the new firewall I screwed up a rdr rule for DNS. I basically bled my internal DNS to the outside world. That broke lectroid.net for a bit but since I’m such a high-traffic site no one noticed. Then when doing some tweaks on a temp web server I blew up the real one, that kinda gets you rolled over real fast.

Finally though, over the weekend I rolled back onto my real web server (which went flawlessly) and here we are.

Me: …do you offer support for Jabber servers?
Them: We do not allow third party software to be installed on our servers. Here is our FAQ entry on this: [link]
Me: Yeah, I got that. I was wondering if you hosted a Jabber server of your own that I could migrate my users to.
Them: All of the servers that we host domains on run on Linux. Here’s our server information: [link]

This was a web helpdesk exchange, but you can just imagine the *click* and the dialtone noise at this point.

While running your own server can be a lot of fun, it can also be a pain in the ass. It’s fun to get a wild hair and setup ALTQ queues when the mood strikes, but it’s less fun to update the os when a new release renders your current version unsupported or you login to your blog software to find you’re a week past a security update (what?!? me?!?).

Plus, I’m walking a tightrope. My “server” hardware, Via C3 based with a Fic FR33E mainboard, while more than adequate for my needs is damn old and I run the same backup strategy as everyone else, that is: I don’t have any. I know that one screwup on my part kills my website, my internet connectivity, my email (more importantly my wife’s email) and kills my internal network as well.

So I’m looking at doing two things: 1) outsourcing my internet stuff to a hosting outfit and 2) simplifying my internal network structure. I have an Apple Airport Extreme that can do the main part of the internal network management that my home server now does (i.e.: NAT and DHCP) and as a bonus, with the internet stuff gone I can reconfigure my current server to provide 90% of what’s left (“geekwerks”) but without being potentially destructive to my network in the event I hose it.

The first step, which is already proving a challenge, is to find a decent hosting service that can handle web hosting (with at least support for WordPress), email (with IMAP support) and ideally Jabber hosting as well.

Stay tuned.

This is making my internet experience, well, a bit sluggish which seems a bit odd as I should have plenty of downstream bandwidth to spare.

Now before you ask, I actually tested this a while ago and my asymmetric DSL doesn’t seem to be affected by the TCP ACK issues, but it sure feels like it is.

Could this be an issue further upstream I wonder?