Real World Computing

My blogging has slowed down considerably lately due to an office move which used up most of my time. There were two aspects of the move; 1. The move itself Whereby all equipment had to be disconnected and packed up then unpacked/reconnected at the new site. There was a lot of planning and testing involved with this. 2. A Temporary Domino Server Switch In some ways, this was more work than the move. Management decided that they wanted our systems to remain running throughout the move. We used the server setup for the "temporarily abandoned" clustering project to set up a new offsite domino server. We did a lot of testing of applications and needed to make a few changes to some of our applications. I'm happy to say that the off site server worked well and kept our systems running throughout the move. I'll provide more detail on changes made and difficulties encountered in later posts.

I've just edited and anonymised my last post in case I can't control myself here... If you haven't read it, you should read that one before this one. We've had no SMTP inbound mail since lunchtime yesterday. We contacted our ISP (PT) but they weren't interested in the problem. They told me to reboot the Domino server.... No thanks. Internal mail is working fine. I tried using a VB Application to send SMTP mail to the server's internal IP Address. It worked fine - proving that if mail were reaching the server it would process it. All indications were that there was a duplicate IP on the internet - but that couldn't be right - we got that problem fixed yesterday... After hours of wasted IT time, we finally discovered the truth. Our ISP (PT) who duplicated our IP Address yesterday had removed the address as requested. They then put the address back into their system and allocated it to a new customer. I can't think of a closing statement that wont get m...

[This post was edited to provide anonymity to the ISP - Not that they deserve it] Our current internet service provider, (I'll call them PT to anonymise them in case this blog takes too much of an annoyed tone) is a medium sized provider in Australia. When I say current, I don't mean that we plan to change... heck, we only change ISP's once, but have had five ISPs. We made a switch from Ozemail shortly after they were taken over by a less service-conscious entity (can't remember who). From there, we moved to Davnet, who were taken over by NTT Australia, who were taken over by PT. All of the service we've received since the initial switch to Davnet has been top-quality. Until, of course, we get to PT. In our early days of PT service, we were affected by an unplanned outage that lasted approximately 2 days. It was (and still is) the biggest total outage in my computing history. Even worse, they didn't seem to be in control of the situation but were at the ...