Completely out of touch

Best laid plans of mice and men, I guess.

I had it all worked out, or so I thought. The prob­lem: I’m mov­ing and I have a mailserv­er at home. How to move it with min­i­mum downtime?

Well, The nice folks at SBC would­n’t let me keep my old phone num­ber any­way, but they were hap­py to pro­vide me with over­lap, mean­ing they would start ser­vice at the new loca­tion before stop­ping ser­vice at the old loca­tion. So this became a plan: I’d get the new ser­vice in, update DNS to the new IP address, then move the serv­er across town as quick­ly as I could.

I even had a fan­ta­sy about speed­ing across town with the serv­er attached to the UPS so as not to have to shut it down. I could still do that, and not have my uptime reset (which is the most impor­tant thing, of course).

I called up SBC a month and a half ago to get this arranged. Then I called my new ISP to get hooked up. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, my new num­ber would not be “in the sys­tem” until AFTER the line was turned on. The new num­ber was installed on Tues­day, and I was told that it might not show up as active for two or three days.

Well, that’s all well and good, but that means the num­ber would show up in their sys­tem on Thurs­day or Fri­day, and it means that I would have a very tight sched­ule for get­ting new entries into DNS… i can’t even find out what my new IP address­es will be until every­thing is turned on, so I can’t even get entries into my pri­ma­ry and back­up DNS.

So it’s a wait­ing game. mean­while I’ve been mov­ing so I’ve had no com­put­er plugged in at my apart­ment. I bought an Air­port Extreme base sta­tion so that my house­mate can get on the net­work with­out me string­ing up wires around the house (I’m so over lay­ing down eth­er­net) and it has a modem built-in for dial-up access when a broad­band con­nec­tion goes down. I con­fig­ured it at the old place and then brought it over to the new place, but Arpine says she can’t con­nect. Not much I can do until I get the com­put­er set up and string eth­er­net down the hall; I don’t have a wire­less card to try to con­nect with.

Any­how, this morn­ing, SBC dis­con­nect­ed my old line, and with it of course the DSL con­nec­tion and so now I have no access to my email for the p90.net, splicer.com, or paroxysm.com accounts. Mail to those domains, includ­ing my mail­ing lists, will prob­a­bly time out or bounce. Arrrgh. I called SBC this morn­ing and it sounds as though their sys­tem sees my num­ber. Hope­ful­ly the new ISP will be able to start the pro­ce­dure of get­ting me online today. Hope­ful­ly it won’t be anoth­er two or three days (grrrrr)

Still, at best case I won’t have email until tues­day evening. If you would like to send me email and it can’t wait quite that long, send me email@ splicer-at-son­ic-dot-net which will get through to me. Also new phone num­ber is ALL-INDY. In either case, I’m trust­ing that you’re smart enough to fig­ure out how those trans­late to real phone num­bers and email address­es. After a cou­ple of days I’m going to change this post to friends-only but for now every­one can see.