Let's see, where to begin...
I host I-R-U (and other stuff) on servers here in my house. I host my own mail, DNS, WWW, etc... Been doing it for 6-7 years now... ISDN, then Cable and then to DSL in 2003. To do this, I have a static, public IP subnet assigned to me by my ISP (now The "New" AT&T). They don't ever change and are reachable from anywhere in the world. Follow?
So, a couple of weeks ago I noticed I could upgrade my DSL account, the one I've had for 4 years now, to higher speed for less money. Not only will the llamas like that, I thought, but it would make IRU perkier for you guys, too. COOL! Life is good, so I placed the order via their web site. They say it takes a few days to complete. Fine...
Oddly, other than the initial robo-email that I got when I placed the order, I never got any other confirmation that my order would proceed, or when, or that it in fact ever happened at all. Nothing. Nada. Stone deaf silence. But I guess it finally did change on 7/31. I noticed no speed improvement at all. As a matter of fact, there is supposed to be a tech coming this morning to find out why. But that's another story. I'm still waiting on him...
Now, you know how when you do things to your computer, changes may not take effect until you reboot? Networking can be similar. Changes may not happen until you log out and log back in. That is what happened here.
Unbeknown to me, the service change was accompanied by an IP subnet change. There was absolutely no mention of this when I placed the order. And what's more, there was no mention of this change when the upgrade actually occurred, nor was I ever even TOLD what my new IP addresses would be. THIS IS ABSURD!!! And I told the Tier 2 tech as much. He actually agreed. This "issue" has come up in there meetings before and they don't know why the business office doing it so strangely. Oh well.
So, there was a real DSL service outage here yesterday morning, resolved by early afternoon. But when it was resolved, and my router tried to reconnect, it could not. It was programmed with different IP addresses than the other end was expecting me to be using.
That's it in a nutshell.
I had to update all my DNS information, as well as the root servers (internic) servers so they could find me. It was a lot of work. It would have been a lot of work anyway, but if I had known about it up front the outage might have been just 2 hours or so.
The "New" AT&T: Screwing things up as effectively as ever.