Connectivity

There's been a few incidents of the site being off-line over the last few days. There's a few causes of this. One is that there's been renovating happening in the flat upstairs and they managed to cut one of our power lines. This took out the power for most of the flat. The other thing is that the router isn't keeping the connection up like it should.

The power has been temporarily fixed, and the builders will come down and do a proper repair job sometime next week.

The router problem is a bit harder to solve: it has an option to keep the connection alive by 're-dialing' if the connection is down for longer than 60 seconds. This isn't working. I'm going to try and write some simple perl (or bash) script to monitor the connection and hopefully push the 'connect' button on the router's control page when necessary.

A side effect of the router being out of action is that mail doesn't work. This isn't really a problem if the outage is a few hours. A longer outage does start to pose a risk of email bouncing due to there being no server to receive it on this end. Generally speaking, a proper Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like Sendmail or PostFix will retry every hour or so until five days have passed. Some poorly written MTAs will give up after only a few hours.