Thursday, 25 March 2004
Explain to Me How That Works Again?
So today our office got a new unbundled ADSL connection. It's almost twice as fast (downstream) as our old one, and we'll get a whole year's access for less than what we were paying for two months at our old provider. The only difference is that there's no uptime guarantee - but considering our old provider had more than one outage that lasted an entire business day, somehow the word "guarantee" doesn't mean a lot to me.
The point is, the new provider sent the modem over by courier once the connection was confirmed (nifty just-in-time service). I had it connected ten minutes later (even a geek has to eat first), took 20 to figure out the Web configuration (static IP via PPPoA, yuck; made a "temporary" setup so that our crufty 192.168/24 internal network can talk to the modem's 10/8 address space; turned off the modem's superfluous default services; blah, blah, blah). A bit under 45 minutes after we'd signed for delivery, our network was using the 1216 Kb/s connection as if nothing on the other side of the firewall had changed. For my final trick, I pointed our extranet's domain record to the new static address.
Tonight, washing it for dinner, I broke my third and last remaining drinking glass.