As mentioned in a Google Plus post: “I’ve come to realize the internet is like oxygen – you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have access to it.”
Last night, after the DSL guy came out and ended up replacing a card in our DSLAM, our DSL blinked on and off for about a half hour, before finally going down completely for 10 minutes. This caused me no small amount of rage, but when it came back up we were back on “fast” data path, with our full 6mbps downstream rate. A quick speedtest confirms where we’re at workable speeds (though by no means “broadband”, but that’s a “#firstworldproblems” scenario), so I set about setting up our permanent rate-limiting/QoS stuff.
While the DSL guy was at the central office, I pulled all the crap out of our wiring closet (though in retrospect I should have swept or vacuumed it while I was in there). I pulled out three computer cabinets, two routers (which we’re using as switches and that’s it), five DSL modems, a fax machine, and an SGI Indigo2. When the poor guy got here it was a rabbit warren of cables and stuff that almost looked like a rat king if DSL modems were rats.
So anyway, so far so good – it looks like we’re back to having a reliable service and we’ve staved off the bandwidth goons for at least a few months.