[conspire] What's old is new again

[Rick Moen]

Back in 2001, I'd been a happy SDSL customer with NorthPoint
Communications for quite a few years, but that firm slid into
bankruptcy and shut down its network.  Happily, I was able to
quickly migrate to Mike Durkin's local firm Raw Bandwidth
Communications's ADSL, which I've happily used for 18 years.

In 2006, I moved within West Menlo Park, back to my original family
home, 1105 Altschul Ave., and arranged with Mike Durkin for a smooth
same-day ADSL cutover on moving day.  Mike and I both did everything
right, but it turned out that the local telco (can't remember if it was
called AT&T yet or was still SBC) shot us in the foot, because the
departing tenants of 1105 Altschul Ave. hadn't technically closed their
AT&T account, so AT&T refused to activate my landline, hence there
couldn't be ADSL service, either.

So, I had a ragged several days of (mostly) no Internet presence until
AT&T un-fscked my service.

Well, campers, over the next couple of days, you may (or may not) 
experience service weirdness / unreachability with stuff to and from
linuxmafia.com (again), because -- sadly -- Mike Durkin has been obliged
by changing business conditions to terminate all service to his legacy
ADSL customers, and (on account of complications I won't get into), I've
been obliged to do a live cutover to new hosting, thus a new IP address,
thus probable authoritative DNS snarls until I gradually un-fsck that.
(Suffice to say that having to suddenly re-IP one's DNS nameserver that
serves dozens of Internet domains, my own and others', is the sort of 
nightmare sysadmins do their best to avoid.)

If you don't have problems, and Web pages load fine, and mailing list
postings post and get delivered to subscribers fine, then great!  
If not, know that I'm working on it (just not 24x7), and will have things
back to normal Real Soon Now.

The actual IP address cutover is expected to occur during the day
Wednesday, for those who are curious.  (My hard deadline is the
following day, Thursday, when Mike intends to terminate ADSL service.)