Majcher.com

Our Frontera Fest show was pretty sweet. We're getting pretty good at this - despite storm clouds, we pulled off a solid, consistently funny and interesting show for an audience of maybe 70-80 people who weren't necessarily there to laugh. The act before us was some dude with a monologue where he read letters from a friend of his who had just died or something, so the crowd was all kinds of warmed up for us. Oh, yeah. It was a school night or something, so pretty much everyone bolted after a quick round of notes in the parking lot, and I stayed through the short intermission to catch Laura Freeman's "Luna Tart Died of a Broken Heart" piece, which was super awesome. She has the best voice in Austin, hands down.

I ducked out of the theater after her (too short) set, and managed to actually make it home by ten o'clock or so. Which turned out to be fortunate, because majcher.com had gone down while I was out. I hooked up the monitor and keyboard, and got ready to kill whatever screwy runaway spammer crap was knocking it out before rebooting, but I got nothing. This machine has a fair amount of value to me and mine, and when it falls over, I get a bit of a panic. Anyway, it was down already, so I just flicked off the killswitch guard and hit the reset button, and waited for it to come back up. It didn't.

So, after a couple hours of freaking out, digging out the rescue CD, turning startup services off and on selectively, and general dicking around, I finally got a shell prompt up, mounted the system, and started the poking around and troubleshooting. Nothing looked wrong, but I'm kind of a doofus of a sysadmin these days, so I was sure I had missed something. Nope. It couldn't start up some of the network services, and hung whenever I tried to do anything useful with them (thanks, Fedora! jerks.) so there was really only one thing left to check, but I knew that couldn't be it. I mean, I could hit the net at large on my laptop over the wireless... ah, crap.

Yep. Fucking Speakeasy. I just changed my DSL package from a fairly expensive business SDSL package with wicked bandwidth (which I previously used for hosting client sites and whatnot) to a new ADSL package for a good chunk less, still with pretty decent bandwidth, but no service guarantees and such. I had the one IP for the new hookup, which I'd been testing with my wifi router, but they were dragging their collective ass on getting my old static IP addresses moved over from the old circuit. I have a ticket open for that (still), but it's been a week or two, so "poke speakeasy customer service" is somewhere around the middle of my to-do list. Well, I guess they finally got around to pushing the button, and tonight was the night that they decided to switch my IPs over. Without telling me about it, of course. The ticket is still pending, but fortunately, my account summary shows the old addresses in the new place. I'm glad they seem to be giving me enough credit to eventually figure that out for myself, but fuck, guys, work with me, here.

Anyway, it was a good thing that I had a spare switch lying around so I could realign the network to accommodate my new setup, or I'd be pretty screwed until I got my ass out to CompUSA or wherever tomorrow. Still, pretty steamed - and tired, if you'll note the time. I dunno what happened - Speakeasy used to be the cool kid on the block, but for the last few years, they've become just another big corporate clusterfuck with no personality and dodgy service. I know a bunch of people who have been with them for years that have dropped them recently - one friend of mine compared it to breaking up with someone, but he had to. It wasn't them, it was him. (It was them.) I've still got servers here, so going with cable or something really isn't an option for me, and just getting stuff switched over within Speakeasy was kind of a pain this time - I can't imagine the hassle it'd be to go over to someone completely new. I guess I'm some kind of loyal customer or something, and I guess that makes me a sucker. I've been with Speakeasy for what, eight years or so now? It's easier just to stay, and suck it up. For now.

So, the plan is to slowly migrate critical services off of majcher.com here - probably move things over to Dreamhost or something, which gives me the willies a little bit, but what're you gonna do? And then, I dunno. Scale the at-home geekery back a little bit. It hurts, but I got shit to do, man, and I don't have time to stay up till 3am fixing broken shit or blowing a weekend rebuilding a box or whatever any more. There's still some stuff that's nice to have a server here for, so I don't expect that it'll be going away completely, and there are some tenacious holdouts on the hosting front, so... well, we'll see what I can do.

In the mean time, sleep is for now. Still plenty of stuff to get done, come morning.