Saturday, March 23, 2013

Network reconfigured

Ok, the new firewall and new IPs are in place. And the various new IP addresses appear to have propagated through DNS Land. The one beginning with 64 is the one you want.

It may be that some of you are currently connected via the old IP (the 69... one); all this means is that the next time we have a firewall restart and your connection drops there is a remote possibility you'll need to either flush the local DNS cache to grab the new address (ipconfig /flushdns on Windows boxes), or restart your client, or reboot your machine (in which case you might want to consider upgrading to a modern OS) -- but most likely everything that's needed to happen has happened already and a simple reconnect should Just Work.

There's still at least one more server reboot to do once I finish reshuffling the various websites and services. That will probably happen later this week.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

IP change coming

Owing to a number of factors (**), I am completely overhauling my network for the first time in 8 years (really 12 years -- yow, have I been doing this that long? -- though the changes I did when I switched away from Covad/IINet back in 2004 were relatively minor compared to what I'm doing now).

The main user-visible thing is that various server IPs, including LambdaMOO's are going to change and, at the very least, your connection will drop when I throw the switch. There will also be some number of minutes of downtime while I futz with the cables or if I have to do unexpected extra debugging on the new firewall. Once that's done, assuming a just world, your DNS should be keeping up with the changes, so that all you'll have to do is reconnect and things will Just Work.

Admittedly, if I manage to do this without taking the server down, I may feel compelled to do a server reboot some time afterwards just to make sure things will continue working the next time the power goes out. We'll see how this goes.

(**) Fafner, my vintage-1998 Pentium box that boots off of a floppy that I use for a firewall is getting harder to maintain now that I no longer have any other working machines that possess a floppy drive. And with djbdns no longer being maintained and not keeping up with the various load-balancing/cloud-whatever-bullshit games that akamai and friends are playing, I need a new DNS server. And I also needed more IP addresses, which Megapath (nee Speakeasy) appears to have finally come through with --- only took them a month to figure out how to do it; evidently, the post-merger layoff of the Speakeasy people took place a little too quickly and there are now various chunks of network infrastructure they don't fully understand anymore and I'm on one of them. bleah -- and because what I'm getting is a completely new block that has to be routed via my current address, I have to completely redo how my DMZ works. So...