The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, March 27, 2003

“Static IP Addresses? Where art thou?”

Ever since this weekend our Internet connection here at the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere has been somewhat flaky. On Tuesday I had to call tech support since the connection was dropped and both a reset and a powercycle of the cable modem were insufficient in restoring a connection. The tech (in Buffalo, NY) read through his script (“Please unplug the power to both the cable modem and your computer.”) and I played along when it seemed necessary (“Okay, my computer has finished booting.” “But it's only been 10 seconds! It took me several hours to optimize my computer to boot in under 40 seconds!” “It's a fast machine.”) and the connection was restored.

Wednesday, there was an outtage of a few minutes, and then there was today.

Today, we lost the connection again. Repeating the operations from Tuesday didn't help and it was then that I had a sinking feeling that, quite possibly, I lost my DHCP lease. When we first obtained the connection, I ran the DHCP client once to get an address, then statically programmed that in for the occasional reboot. Never had a problem, and the IP address was bound to the MAC address on my Ethernet card.

But apparently, not anymore.

The cable modem finally resynced, but none of our traffic was going anywhere. But once I re-ran the DHCP client and obtained a new IP address, the Internet beckoned.

God, I wish for the days when I had thirty-two (32!) static IP addresses, with control of the reverse DNS lookups. It's barely tolerable with one (1) static IP address but a dynamic address?

Let's just say I find dynamic IP addresses annoying (there's the changes to DNS so I can log in to my home network from elsewhere, and changes to the SMTP server I use to allow outgoing email, and … )

It takes a licking …

Mark found himself at Dialtone Internet the other day and took the time to take pictures of tower, the server that runs this website (as well as others) and handles all our email, just in case you're curious as to what you can use that old 486 for …

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