The Boston Diaries

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Renumbering

For several reasons we need to consolidate a large portion of our IP addresses so that Smirk can transfer a sufficiently sized block to the new Charlotte, North Carolina data center we're moving into. It's never easy to renumber, and I knew this was coming up, but I didn't realize that Smirk would require it done today.

We had already reassigned a block to a customer, leaving us with The Office machines, and the DSL units to renumber. The Office would be trivial compared to renumber the DSL units.

Renumbering the DSL units.

Which includes one particularly annoying unit, who had to have their DSL unit reconfigured twice!

Sigh.

Now, unlike residential DSL, we manage both sides of the connection. Also, we give out static IP addresses (and blocks of IP addresses, although the larger block of IP addresses per DSL customer isn't changing, it's the IP address of the individual DSL unit that is). So it's not like we can call our customers and say “just power cycle your DSL unit.”

On our end, not only do I have to reconfigure the DSL unit, but change some routing entries on our DSL router, and make changes to the radius database (which customers get which IP addresses) and make sure to do the changes in the correct order or else I'll have to end up talking to the customer at the far end, trying to talk them (invariably non-computer literate) through the steps to change the DSL configuration.

I manged to do it, but it wasn't smooth (mostly loosing connection to the far end, which is an occupational hazzard when you are trying to do this remotely). And I ended up talking to all the customers (and even visiting the site of that one particularlly annoying unit) and now we have a bunch of IP addresses to assign to the Charlotte, North Carolina site.