Wow. Just. Wow.
I am spent.
What a mess…..
I have proof. I can show you the trend line on groov. I was in church.
There is no way I had anything to do with it. Nothing!
Let me back up a little…… Friday afternoon, I put the IP cop in.
Wrote the last blog. (No idea why it did not publish then, but it was probably me – I schedule a lot of my blogs). Had Friday night dinner with the family thinking it was all behind me.
Saturday morning. All was right in the bald geeks network.
Church. Streamed the service and it went smooth.
After church spent some time with Terry.
After dinner tried to visit my website….. Nothing…. Whaaaaaa.
Did some little digging. All outbound connections were fine. All inbound that went to my IP address worked, but anything that went to thebaldgeek.net was getting rejected.
Doing a ping of my URL worked and showed the correct IP address.
As such, some of my aircraft tracking stuff was working, some wasn’t.
Thinking it was a caching issue, I got an old laptop out that had not been used for at least a week, tried to get it on the network……
IPcop would not give it an IP address to get it on the network.
Link light, but no way I could get it to pick up an IP address and gateway.
It was around 9:30pm by this stage.
Rebooted IPcop for the 3rd time.
Nothing.
By 10:30pm I give up. My site is down. Had been for many hours (it stopped working around 11:50ish am – like I said, while I was ‘in’ church)…. and I have no idea why or how to fix it.
I thought about putting the edge router back on, but as I said, I was spent.
Went to bed.
Did not sleep much.
Got up around 4am.
First thing in the morning as usual, took my blood pressure, it came up in big red numbers for the first time ever… waited a few minutes, took it again. Better, not good. Gave it a few more minutes, and got my highest reading (128 over 84) ever.
Went for a run (it’s my thinking time).
Came back and did some reading….
There were plenty of people that said ‘why don’t you just put in the same router as you had in the first place?’… Two main reasons, it ran hot. Really hot. (This is why they have been failing for others, and probably was the cause for mine to fail).
The other reason is because it only allowed 32 port forward rules and 32 static IP address reservations. Both limits I bumped up against often.
Asus’s second latest router, the RT-AC3100 solved the heat issue and in my Googling found that there was some third party ‘WRT’ like firmware for it that removed both of the limits (and added some sweet traffic logging). It also added OpenVPN (as well as the stock PPTP VPN option).
So, that was that then.
I went down to BestBuy and got one.
Once I got back, about 20 min later I was up and running. 2-3 hours latter, I had things dialed in pretty sweet.
Given that IPcop ran fine for some 14-18 hours before it fell over, I am not counting my chooks just yet…. But, I am hopeful.
I have a VOIP phone, I can skype and my RSS feed is now working again. (Another weird thing that stopped working a few routers back).
Freddy wanted to know why I did not just get this router last Sunday……
So, in case you are like my wife and have been keeping track. A total of five (yes FIVE) routers have been abused the past week.
I had no idea how much I depended on my network to do my job. I had no idea how fragile it was. I had zero clue how hard it would be to get it setup the way I needed.
I am spent. But we seem to be back up and running.
