Strange happenings at TCP Towers

Something very strange is afoot at TCP Towers. Simon the SysAdmin is happy just for a change. And the systems are behaving themselves.

However, it wasn't always such a rosey picture this week. Oh no.... you see, this week saw several things happening:

First of all, we had a nice little mess created by our admin person. This week saw customers with static IP addresses being moved to dynamic IP addressing. This was thanks to RIPE saying "Thou shalt not use static IP addresses for dial-up connections" and us having a new link to the outside world a few months ago. Since we knew that this was on the cards, I started playing with a system which would send SMTP for a single host/domain into a single POP3 mailbox. This is something I had working at the beginning of this week and pretty much fully tested.

The technical side of things was not the problem. The problem was caused by our admin person not actually announcing the change until 3 days beforehand. To say that our local support newsgroup got a little warm is an understatement. For a while we had lucifier phoning us to ask if we would be willing to rent the space out for damned souls. Since the admin person had caused all of the flamewars on the groups, we let him deal with all of the political issues and we only donned our asbestos underwear when we had to answer technical questions.

Tonight was the point at which the change over actually took place. So muggins was at TCP Towers late tonight to make the change over. After I had checked that everything was ready to go, I had a wonderful feeling of anticipation. I had three windows open on our main server that would initiate the changes at a <clickety-click>... and I waited until 11pm came around.

The feeling of joy when I press enter those three times was so nice. You see, our static customers are also the customers who cause the most hassle on the system and use up lines the most :) Even more statisfying was the fact that the system I had coded up was working exactly as it should. However, all of the mail queue was emptying of the mail for the SMTP users.... and I wondered why the mail server was becoming a little unresponsive. I did an uptime and thought "Hmmmmm, a run average of 68. That's not good". My first thought was that something had gone badly wrong.... I waited and slowly the load average dropped to normal.... and the mail queue dropped to almost nothing :)

An interesting addition to this is that we have this one really annoying customer, who I will call X from here on in. Now X is fairly clueful, at least clueful enough to fix most things that he breaks :) The problem is that he is also one of our most vocal customers when things break or don't do what he wants.

You can guess what X's reaction to our announcement was can't you. It wasn't nice. He basically said that he would leave our service, etc, etc. After he had stopped frothing at the mouth he started to ask questions like "So why can't you collect mail via SMTP with a dynamic IP address ?". At which point I responded with a long post about how whilst it was technically possible, it wasn't a great idea which went into lots and lots of details. His response to this was basically "I surrender". As it turns out, he ended up liking the new system and congratulating us on the service [sigh] its a pity we can't kill some users off to be honest :)

The second situation this week was self inflicted. You see, I've managed to go without chocolate for just about 2 months now. And that's chocolate in any form. What is more surprising is that for the last week I've also managed to stay off alcohol, cigarettes and (most surprising of all) coffee or anything with caffeine in it. The worrying thing was that I just decided to do all of this for no real apparent reason. Its also interesting that bar a nasty headache for the first part of this week, I'm not missing any of them.

Posted on 1st Mar 1996