After 3 weeks in the UK for CCGrid 2005 plus Donna’s talks, not to mention a slightly early celebration for my fathers 80th (we had to fly back the day before alas)! For his birthday we presented him with a Clarks Pie with lit candle on top as a tidy treat for him!

Unfortunately whilst we were away our ADSL modem got reset as part of a blackout here and came back up in the wrong configuration, which stopped our email working here at csamuel.org, plus the Nobody Nowhere and Auties.org websites. Despite sterling work by our house sitter via an hour long phone call to me in a car park on my mobile I couldn’t properly diagnose what was wrong and it was only when we got back last night that I was able to figure out what was wrong and revert it to the correct configuration.

Unfortunately as part of “fixing it” I streamlined some of the firewall rules by merging some together, forgetting that the rule I was merging them into only applied to a single class C subnet, so even though ADSL was up and running email came to a screeching halt. I spotted my thinko today and corrected it, leading to a new law: Never Change Firewall Rules When Jetlagged.

Now it seems like everything is tickety-boo again, so if you’ve emailed me or Donna and had it bounce then can you please retry it!