Just crap

What a past couple of days it has been… Here in West Texas it has been raining pretty much non-stop since Saturday. Along with all of the rain the high temperature has been at an all time low for this region: in the 60s. I really liked that fact. It’s nice to be able to have the windows open in the apartment and enjoy a nice cold beer without having the hum of an air conditioner trying to keep up with the summer heat.

Monday morning was a nightmare, at least it was one that I was expecting. I spent most of my Saturday at the office re-addressing the IP network. The office has been “online” since 1996 using the same /25 subnet that we were assigned. Now, in 2004 we have just about used up all 126 of those public IP addresses. So on Saturday I installed a Linux based NAT gateway and moved all of the internal servers, printers, scanners, and access points to private IP addresses. Unfortunately I completely forgot to update the DNS servers to reflect the changes in the addresses and on Monday morning all hell broke loose, oops. Monday morning the only thing working correctly for the office workers was the ability to surf the Internet, and at about 7:30am my office phone, cell phone, and Instant Messaging clients were ringing/vibrating/chiming off the scale. After about 15 minutes of that I disconnected the office phone, turned off my cell phone, and closed the IM clients and got to work figuring out what I had screwed up on Saturday. Luckily for me it was just DNS issues that were easily resolved. Lesson learned: always check your DNS to make sure it’s responding with the correct addresses.

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