I always dread ISP transitions, because of the disruption and the lingering side effects. Today at midnight we went off the air. So much for Qwest's guidance that we'd probably be down for 2-3 hours while the circuit got switched. I stayed up to see if it would come back, but it didn't so I finally want to sleep. When I woke up at 8:30, the connection was still down. Time for a friendly call to the folks at Drizzle to find out what the status was. Apparently Qwest had switch the circuit, but my IP addresses had not yet been assigned and wouldn't be assigned until the right person came in around 11AM. Okay, not great, but encouraging. I was promised a call when the IP's were assigned. Good thing too, because the DSL modem was not in bridging mode, as I thought. So a quick run around to find the management cable, pull the router from the wiring closet (I have no portables that have an RS-232 port), and figure out how to talk to the management shell for the router. A 5 minute phone conversation with Drizzle took care of switching to bridging mode, and we were in business. Mail started pouring in, I updated the DNS at Network Solutions, and 2 hours later www came back on line. Now the rest is little cleanups as I find places where there were dependencies on the old IP addresses, and cleaning up along the way.

So to inaugurate the switch, we used a combination of iSight and telephone (iSight sound was kind of wonky, and we didn't want to experiment during the meeting) for me to attend a meeting at OSAF this afternoon. The little bit of video made a big difference.