intuitive engineering

…sort of.

My ISP fixed the DNS flaw. In doing so, they managed to stop caching ANY DNS results and slowed every action from within my local network to a crawl. This lasted for about nine days. Aaaarggggg.

Tech support or any kind of customer service from Verizon is a nightmare. So are they all, it seems. Somewhere along the line, service became an option, rather than a requirement. I was almost at my point-of-no-return – where the pain of waiting on hold and then escalating up until I find someone who understands that this is their issue, not mine, and that they need to fix the DNS caching was unavoidable.

Fortunately I went out of town for a week.

On my return the DNS had been fixed, and the speed was much better. And Verizon finally realized if they want to prevent web servers from running out of home networks they need to block port 443 as well as port 80. I’m pretty sure this was as a result of investigating the slowness in their own network – one of the things I would have done was to look at traffic. In taking a closer look at what was flowing over their lines, they plugged the port.

That means… Actually that just made an immediate necessity of what I had determined to do anyway. I needed to get this site into a data center. I already knew that. In a real network it can run on port 80, there are UPSes and backup power, 24×7 monitoring. Much bigger pipes.

Thanks for finding the site again, on port 80 this time. It no longer needs SSL, really, except for admin tasks. In moving it I put in relative links instead of full URLs, so it becomes a bit more portable, and easier to maintain.

— dsm

Tags: website