And here we go again. Today, the internet was down. Well, at least if you happened to be in a certain state of Austria and happened to be hooked up to a certain Telekom backbone line. Which my server just so happened to be, together with a few thousand other households and businesses. The downtime started roughly at 01:00pm and lasted for about an hour, or maybe one and a half. I was a bit on edge because of this, since it’s hard to tell whether it’s just the WAN access being down, or my actual server going up in flames. Problem is, that I can’t just ping my SDSL/SHDSL extender to see which one is the case, because the IP of that little metal box is being mapped through in a DMZ style for all protocols, all the way from god knows where, maybe even the VIX backbone, but at least from the state backbone.

So, even if the entire town is offline, I can still ping that IP no matter if the DSLAM is a mile away, or actually 50 miles away. Weird stuff. But that’s the way it is. So while I was still thinking, wether I shall mount my metal horse and ride home at full speed to rescue my server – possibly in vain – all those little lights started coming back online again; IRC bots, mail services, web, blah. What a relief, the IBM monstrosity at home was still alive, as usual. Mostly. I should think of some preferrably free way to verify the health of that machine, without having to rely on its actual WAN link… Mmmh.. maybe another day.