lectroid.net

*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…

So lectroid.net seems to be back. Apparently AT&T mistakenly disconnected a few phone lines at my ISP and this included their residential DSL customers (that would be me) as well as their office phones.

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.

So after much trial and error I finally have queueing set up on my home network!

Most people on asynchronous DSL connections like mine use queues to prioritize TCP ACK packets. As I’d said before my DSL seems unaffected by that particular issue which is interesting in and of itself because it seems to indicate that 1) my DSL is a fatter pipe than they advertise and 2) the bandwidth limiting is happening farther upstream and TCP ACK packets are being prioritized there.

Well that’s all well and good, but I recently discovered that during a large upload (*cough*bittorrent*cough*) my SSH sessions became laggy and generally a pain to use… and we can’t have any of that.

Continue reading ‘Priority queues’ »