Flashes of Panic

Yesterday we had a sort of gremlin in the network. Everything upstream of our network was running slowly; dialup slowly, in fact. It worked, but it crawled. Inside the network, things were flying as usual. I rebooted the network hardware that sits at our end of the T1. No effect. I checked load on the gateway. Nothing exceptional. I emailed our upstream provider. Nothing showing there, either. They agreed to ask the telco which owns the line to run a line test overnight.

(An aside: Here’s telecommunications deregulation for you: we pay two different companies for our T1. One company owns the cable and some kind of box in our basement which is locked shut and carries warnings about how it will burn your hands off if you touch it. That’s the telco. They own the line. The other company is in Springfield; they pick up the other end of the line, assign IP addresses to a few boxes at our end (I think we have three numbers—router, gateway, and FTP server) and generally give us an internet dial tone.)

I hadn’t even taken my bike to the basement this morning when the one other person in the building tracked me down and said we were still bogged down, so this time I rebooted everything: network hardware, router, gateway, switch. I figured I’d do it first thing, before anyone else turned up, but I did end up having a long discussion with the acquiring editor about the relative benefits of doing the most possible with cheap hardware.

It looks like the gremlin has been purged, but I’m still not sure what it was.

Now playing: Come And Find Me from Golden Age of Radio by Josh Ritter