Furnation ETA next week

Liger, Furnation's Tech fur, posted on fur.announce and a few other places. It all boils down to the telecom folk taking avantage of an existing fiber optic line, but not testing out the line to see if it could carry DSL info. Hopefully, it'll be Monday at the least. Full details below:

From Liger:

Hey folks,

OK, here's the long and short (mostly the long) of where we stand with
FurNation today.

Short Version: The telephone guys showed up and did indeed install
the Symmetric Digital Subscriber Lines (SDSLs) but the lines are not
working properly. It will be, at the very earliest, Monday before
they are operational. (Now skip to "Continued" below for the rest of
the story.)

Long Version: Technically speaking SDSLs are not even available where
Nexxus lives. His new apartment reads out at about 19,000 line-feet
from the local telephone Central Office (CO). The real-world limit
for 1.0Mbps SDSL is about 12,500 feet and I have never heard tell of
1.5Mbps working at anything over 10,000 feet. So how is Nexxus
getting two 1.5Mbps SDSLs you ask?

Well... It seems that by a small stroke of luck, this apartment
complex is very new (only about 10 months old) and when it was built
they contracted with a small telephone company (smaller than one of
the baby bells anyway) to provide telephone service to the apartment.
That company not being too terribly stupid, decided to run fiber optic
from the main Teleco CO to a "mini" CO of their own right there on the
apartment complex facility. Hence they can indeed install the needed
SDSL interface card in their equipment closet on the apartment
premises and then provide the needed bandwidth back to the main CO via
their optical cable connection.

The SDSL interface card (apparently called a "blade" in the DSL
industry) was indeed installed in the apartment complex's wiring
closet last Friday. Today the phone company was to come out to
Nexxus' apartment with the SDSL modems to install the lines on his end
at 11:00am CDT. They actually showed up about 1:00pm CDT but at
least they did bring the modems. The lines where picked and
installed. The modems configured and put in place. And? nothing
happened. The test equipment shows that the modems and the lines are
good and talking properly to the "blade" in the wire closet (which is
responding properly) but the "blade" is not talking back through the
fiber optic cable back to the main CO.

So technically speaking Nexxus does have two symmetric 1.5Mbps lines
in and working but he can only talk to the interface card in the
apartment complexes wire closet about 100 yard away. :/ (Not too
good for $400 a month each, is it?) Anyway, the phone company with
allegedly drag one of the "field engineers" out early next week (they
won't promise Monday) to see if he/she can figure out what the problem
is.

Continued: Once the lines are finally operational, FurNation will go
back up on a static (numeric) IP address within an hour or three.
However, it will most likely take 2-3 more days after that for the URL
www.FurNation.com to work properly again. ...And yes we will post the
static IP address as soon as it is available.

That is the story for the moment, we'll try to keep you informed as
circumstances permit.

Take care,

Lyger

FurNation Hardware Systems Engineer

P.S. Speaking of hardware, we did take this downtime to make some
upgrades:

The main (old) FurNation webserver was a dual Pentium - 233 with 256Mb
of RAM and a four drive U33 5400rpm 64Gb drive array (Promise
FastTrak33).

The new FurNation webserver is a dual Pentium III -750 with 512MB
(soon to be 1GB, I hope) of RAM and a four drive U100 7200rpm 80Gb
drive array (Promise FastTrak100). It should help a lot with the lag.