Mike's Journal

Today I had intended to spend much of the day writing code. But as it happened, I spent most of it wrestling with our network setup instead.

See, the original plan was to set up the network along much the same lines as it had been in Washington: with a nice fat block of public IP addresses routed straight through to an industrial-strength firewall, with our servers sitting directly on the Internet, as it were. I’ve been managing things that way for years, and its worked fine for me. But the new T1 circuit came with a new-to-me router that didn’t want to play nice with our firewall when it came to setting everything up. I’ve spent a lot of time the last week trying to convince the techs at Bandwidth.com that they needed to get it all set up for me to just get out of the way and route packets.

Finally, this morning, I gave up and let their all-in-one router do what it wants to do: act as a firewall and NAT appliance and hide all of our devices behind non-routable IP addresses. Then I had to go in and set up port forwarding for the servers that really needed to be public. None of this should have been my problem, but I was wasting too much time waiting for things to get set up, so finally I read the fine manuals and figured it all out.

Anyhow, the upshot is that after most of a day of screwing around, our blogs and such are back online. There are probably a few dozen things I haven’t fixed yet, but I’ll sort them out as they come up.

Meanwhile, Dana was out checking out a new karate dojo to join, and the kids were running wild. Fortunately there is plenty of house for them to run wild in now.

I was pretty worn out by the time dinner rolled around, but managed tuna noodle casserole, fruit, and leftover mac and cheese for the troops. After dinner, I spent a few hours doing some of the coding that I’d expected to work on this morning. So it goes.