Doesn't seem to have been my day. About a quarter to eleven this morning my Comcast link went out. I was busy at the time doing something local, and didn't notice it for about half an hour.

Well, what could it be? Power cycling the cable modem didn't help, so I decided to cultivate patience, and went out for a walk to get some lunch. After trying the nachos at the local Mexican restaurant (good, but not ultimately something I'll probably ever get again, simply because there are other things on the menu I like more) I came back, and it was still down.

So it's telephone time. After playing support-system-pinball for a while (If you're in Afghanistan, please press 7 por favor boop beep ding-ding-ding tilt) I reached a human, who confirmed that my modem wasn't online. Far as he could tell, I was the only one. No outages reported.

But, see, Comcast is a Jekyll-and-Hyde outfit. It's odd. There's one company who sells services to home users: telephone, television, internet. There's a different company who sells the same thing to companies and commercial users. They use the same wires, but not all the same equipment. I'm with the latter one, surprisingly enough. Why? Because I have a server, and home users aren't permitted to run servers. I'm not a company and I don't do anything commercial, but if I want to have a server and a permamently-assigned IP, I have to deal with the commercial side. (AND pay about twice as much per month.) Since I'm honest, I do that.

I got forwarded to the other company, and played pinball again for a while (Please key in your shoe size in centimeters) and reached another human, who told me it was a systemic outage and about 500 people were affected.

Why did the first guy not know that? Well... another reason we commercal users are different is that we're using a different carrier frequency than normal home users do. I don't compete for bandwidth with my neighbors. Everything beyond a certain point in the system is different hardware for us'n, and there was an outage of some kind on the commercial side.

Whatever it was, they were working on it but had not said when they thought it would be fixed. Good enough. So I cultivated patience again.

Actually, it was a relief to hear that. What I was afraid was that the bifurcated nature of the company had bitten me in the ass again. Twice now a tech support guy from the home-co has looked in the wiring box, seen that I was connected, looked at his list and not seen me listed as a customer, and decided I shouldn't be, and disconnected me. After which the only thing I could do was call commercial-co and get them to send out a tech to reconnect me again. I was afraid the same thing had happened again, in which case it probably would have been tomorrow before I would get back online. But since it was a systemic problem, and they were already working on it, it'd be much sooner.

And lo and behold, about another hour later, and the cable light stopped blinking and went solid (carrier back up!) and I started getting hits on my server again.

And I was instantly able to reach all of my favorite web sites except this one, or indeed any meenu or munu site. Oops.

Pixy says we had a drive failure on the server that hosts munu, and that machine does DNS for meenu so it took us down too. OK, that kind of thing happens. But to misquote that great Philosopher, Churchy LaFemme, "Friday the 13th happened on Tuesday this month."

AND on the 15th, to boot.

In the mean time, apropos nothing in particular, here's a picture of Akidra from UFO Princess Valkyrie 2.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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