20-June-2002 : Modem Replacement

Yesterday I replaced the ADSL modem that this site uses for internet connectivity. I was finding that the Alcatel SpeedTouch Pro was becoming increasingly less reliable. I have now replaced the modem with a D-LINK DSL-500. This was not as easy as it should have been. I found out that upgrading the firmware on the modem is essential.

Once I upgraded the firmware and entered the correct routing information the modem was quickly online. This caused an outage of about an hour, but this is nothing compared to the loss of availability with the old unit. I have not thrown the old unit out though. It is now in our spare parts cupboard for disaster recovery purposes.

All in all, Radioactive Networks infrastructure is improving all the time. The next upgrades are scheduled to be a redundant firewall (Scheduled for July 27), and improved patch panels (early July).

23-May-2002 : Server Upgrade

Last night we upgrader the main Radioactive Networks server [Uranium]. It was intended that all traffic would fall over to the backup machine [Plutonium]. Unfortunately we had misconfigured the firewall [Reactor] meaning that local traffic got diverted, but no external traffic got diverted.

Apart from that the process went smoothly. So far the only issues upgrading to RedHat 7.3 as been changing the mail servers in XINETD, IMP WebMail client failing to work, and a minor issue with finally comissioning the machines on board network card.

17-May-2002 : Redundancy

Radioactive Networks is a small consultant engineering business based in Sydney, Australia. In the past Chief Engineer Darryl Smith has needed to manage work around full time employment with Pacific Power.

Radioactive Networks is pleased to announce that Darryl Smith has just been made redundant from his position within Pacific Power allowing him to spend more time working with the company. Please contact us if we can assist with your business.

4-May-2002 : ADSL

ADSL access was out for about 3 hours today. It appeared to be an authentification problem with Telstra. Anyway we are back online now.

26-April-2002 : High Availability

Over the next few days I will be commissioning a high availability system for our servers. This will mean that there is less chance of the www site being unavailable due to maintainence.

The firewall is still only a single point of failure, but I anticipate that changing soon

4-April-2002 : Outage

OK – Sorry about the Outage. It was unplanned and took out all telecommunications to our server site. Voice connections are still out and are likely to be for days. However during the day the ADSL connection returned. This is thanks to luck rather than having things repaired – as the phone line that ADSL uses is quite out of service.

We are assuming that it is water causing our problems, and we need to wait for Telstra to fix it. It would appear that the ADSL signal has a tiny bit of resistance to the water. More information will be provided later.