thebaldgeek

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.

My Aussies mates are great.
32 emails and a solid phone call latter and they almost have me sorted… well, ok, my network sorted….
Dan and Gary really were a huge help in helping me see through the fog and see my options and a way forward in a much better light.

Long story short, we ended up modifying a small computer, installing Linux on it with a software package called IPcop.
At this stage, we have it in and running things. There is some mopping up to get the last of the control devices readdressed, but the point is, things are back up and running.

There are a few quirks with the new router software. For example, a lot of the daily tests that I do with networking equipment and services are on non-standard port numbers, this means in the new software, I have to first make a ‘service’ for that port number, then I can open the firewall for it and do the port forward. It is surprising how annoying it is. I am still trying to find a way to label the service so that it makes sense, is quick and easy for me to find and makes it easier to read my firewall rules. (You can not rename your services once they are in use, so it has been a drag getting things working).

The wifi is also a work in progress. The new router does not include wifi which was deliberate. I was not happy with the wifi for the past, well, 5+ years, the whole time we have been in this house it has been hit and miss with the coverage and speeds, so it has been on my to-do list to fix for that whole time… In the past it has been tied to my main router, so was hard to get interested about fixing it, but now that it is totally separate, I am actually excited about fixing it… AND since the router was free, I hope I can use a bit of the budget for that on wifi access points.

Backing up the network is another issues I wanted to address. If it crashes (or breaks) again, I DO NOT (can not) go another week like the past one…… I need a solid disaster recover plan in place to get the network back to where it was. The new software and hardware should offer this, and it is something I will be testing once the dust settles.

Lastly, I do not have as much visibility of my network traffic as I hoped. A lot of my testing can sometimes get out of control…. I can have a service spew network traffic loud, far and wide and it has been hard to see that in the past, I wanted to address this in anything I implemented, so to that end, I hope to find some plugins or tools to help me see the invisible packets of traffic on the network (hint, TRON).

Anyway, we are not totally out of the woods, but the fog, doom and gloom has lifted and I can breath (and sleep) again.

Half a planet away, and my mates are still digging me out of holes.
Auwsom.