kahunaburger

On Saturday evening we had a massive thunderstorm in the area. From 6:45pm on it was flashing and rumbling all around the house. Max decided to hide himself in one of the closets. He’s a big, big chicken when it comes to thunderstorms. I did not realize that the internet connection went down at 7:00pm. Only later that evening (or was it early Sunday morning) I saw that there was no out-bound/in-bound activity. The “DSL” light on the 2Wire modem was flashing at me as if it was trying to tell me something. On Sunday I called Qwest and Cybermesa (my ISP) and opened trouble-tickets with both of them.

Then, finally, today the Qwest guy showed up and confirmed that all the circuits leading into my house checked out fine and that the issue must be inside my home. When he saw my first generation 2Wire modem he just started to grin and told me that most likely the modem was fried. He hooked up his DSL testing device to the main line coming into the house and sure enough got a good signal. We replaced the faulty modem with a new one and within minutes I was back up and running again. He told me that he replaced 7 modems in the area over the last 48 hrs. He also claimed that the newer version of the modem seems to be a bit more resistant to power surges on the DSL line - I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

And to add to the mess: Just recently I switched over to dump the main disk on my FreeBSD system to the second disk in the same computer. For that purpose I had created a mirror-setup of the original boot-disk. It was Stupid (yes, with a capital ’s’) not to try to reboot immediately after I had made those changes. Turned out that I did something wrong and that poor kahunaburger.com would not boot. Downloaded the 5.4 release disks from www.freebsd.org, burnt them to CDs and corrected the mistake in sysinstall’s partition/label editor.

Phew - that was a handful for a Monday morning. NOT … GOING … TO … TOUCH … THAT … SETUP … IN … A … WHILE!!!