Mil-Veh members:
As you all know, mil-veh was down again, this time for about 100 hours. And
once again, it wasn't a problem with the server but with my ISP and my
so-called dedicated connection. For years things worked fine, but some
out-of-state ISP swallowed the local, more technically-savvy firm, and the
rest is history. Unsurprisingly, it was a problem with my ISP's router,
located in the phone company's Central Office. My ISP could have fixed the
problem immediately, if they had had the password to their router.
Anyway, after a router reboot my connection is back up, but these outages are
simply unacceptable. I am glad to report that my DSL line is now in (192K up
and down) and I will move the server over to it as soon as practical. There
are some issues that I must work through first, though. If you are technically
inclined, I must move my nameservers as well as the web and mail servers to a
new block of IP addresses, and I need to coordinate the move with Network
Solutions and my new ISP. It is a bit of a pain, but I am confident that it
will be well worth it. Not only is the new connection significantly faster
than my old ISDN line, but it is half the price.
I know I need to spend more time on basic list maintenance, but working for a
quasi-dot-com has been particularly hard over the last six months. The
dot-bomb is rippling through even established companies. A couple of years
ago, one list member commented that he wished he could invest in me. I replied
that although I appreciated the sentiment, few people succeed commercially in
such circumstances. Small communities like mil-veh are labors of love that are
self-sustaining; they're not built on a venture capital business model. See
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17148.html for additional discussion of
this issue.
As I said, I know I need to be more hands-on in supervising the list. My
efforts have gone into keeping the list up (no help from my ISP there) behind
the scenes--for example, ironically enough I upped the server memory to 896MB
last week, after the connection had already gone down. My day-job team rolls
out our website in a few short weeks and until then I expect to still leave
for work before 8am and get back home at 10pm, but I will do my best to make
the cutover from the old ISP to the new ISP as smooth as possible and as soon
as possible. I will continue to have to depend on you policing yourselves, and
keep in mind the simple rules that keep the list a positive resource,
especially http://www.mil-veh.org/archives/99-09/0001.html and
http://www.mil-veh.org/archives/99-09/0002.html and
http://www.mil-veh.org/archives/99-09/0003.html .
--Arthur, Mil-Veh List Admin in Absentia
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 05 2001 - 07:58:35 PST