DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

If you can read this, I congratulate you! You have braved the rough DNS waters to surf to my server’s new home.

I spent nearly five hours today standing around while a series (and, many times, a parallel) of Pac*Bell and PBI technicians tried to make my new DSL work. The first tech tried a router and 3 modems. All showed synch, but none passed traffic.

The installation tech had to leave (PBI folks are forbidden from working overtime) but they dispatched someone else, apparently missing the message that something in the central office was broken. The second tech confirmed that the first tech was correct in diagnosing a problem “elsewhere,” and then he went and sat in his truck for 90 minutes waiting for P*B to change hardware in the CO. The hardware apparently got changed, but no one thought to call me or him to say so.

Finally, after 6:00 PM, the line came up. And then about 11:00 PM I got my server installed and configured. And then by about 12:30 AM some of the DNS and whois changes began to take effect.

I think this site actually showed less than 1 hour’s downtime, although individual client experiences vary with the performance of their local DNS caches. I saw traffic coming it shortly after booting up the server, though, so that was gratifying. All in all it was the least painful server-and-DNS relocation I’ve ever done.