Ramblings

Again, it’s been a week since I posted last and I apologize for that deficiency. A lot has happened since that last scream for help. Sometime shortly after posting the edit on the 11th, my cable connection died. I was messing with my router remotely when it happened, so I just assumed I broke something that could be fixed when I got home that evening. Man was I ever wrong. I got home, reset all my hardware (not the computers), and give it another whirl. The first thing I noticed was that my router picked up a new IP address and the second was that there was only one DNS server listed where there is normally two.

It took me a second to realize that the new IP address that was assigned to me was a 10.0.X address. In other words, it was well within the private network range of addresses. It all suddenly made sense, they had cut me off. After some quick poking around I realized that all outgoing DNS requests (for stuff like http) were getting resolved to the same internal IP address. Just to show you how messed up their system is, I know the desired outcome was to redirect me to a page telling me that my service had been discontinued ‘automatically’. However, their http server (IIS I think) was not configured to ignore the hostname that was requested. As a result, the page would not load.

After looking up the IP address that everything was being redirected to, I typed it in myself. Ya, just a simple ‘you account has been disabled due to non-payment’ page. I was current on my bill, I didn’t owe them anything. Well, a very long story somewhat short is that I spent the next day on the phone. I dealt with about four people at Longview Cable and Cablelynx before I got things all fixed. Thanks goodness I finally was connected to someone who knew what was going on.

In other news, the craziness has subsided some around these parts. I got one of the major projects out the door and working (the one I was freaking out about the errors last time) by the end of last week and I got the second one for University Advancement up and running yesterday. The one for Advancement was actually rather simple, but I needed the time to work on it which I didn’t get until yesterday.

Now it’s just back to Traditional Web Registration, a large enough project on it’s own.