Thursday, June 7, 2012

Potential flora.ca downtime June 8-11

I'm re-posting this here as http://www.flora.ca/status/350 may not be available over the weekend.

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The FLORA.ca services may be down all weekend, possibly starting some time Friday June 8 and continuing to some time on Monday June 11.


Background:

The FLORA.ca servers (flora.org, digital-copyright.ca, etc) are hosted on a service I have been receiving from NCF.ca, who up until recently was reselling TekSavvy.com services. The NCF decided to transition to Bell. Since I wish to minimize the services I receive from the incumbent phone/cable companies (see other articles on this blog), I am now trying to switch back to TekSavvy.

I wasn't given enough advanced notice of the timing, so I made an IP address transition on Tuesday May 29'th. Some services were likely down for people as DNS propagated across the network. Some people, ironically NCF.ca email users, have noticed that email messages from the mailing lists have not been able to be received as there is a routing issue between some of the static IP addresses I was assigned and the NCF.

I signed up to receive a new service from TekSavvy, which I consider to be a transition back to TekSavvy as I never intended or wanted to move from their service that had been working well for years. Unfortunately I had to set a cancellation date for the new NCF/Bell service before TekSavvy could set an install date. Based on the conversation with a person at TekSavvy I set a cancel date for Friday June 8.

Today when I called TekSavvy to confirm that everything was set for Friday, I was told that the date had moved to Monday. Annoying as I had not been informed, and don't know when I would have been told if I had not called. I have now left an Office message with the NCF in the (unfortunately faint) hope that they can hold off the cancellation at their end until Monday.

It is quite possible that Bell techs will disable the DSL on the line some time Friday only to re-connect the service on Monday. I don't have any control over this, and I apologize for any inconvenience.

It is frustrating that a transition from TekSavvy to Bell happened without my permission or anything other than reconnecting my PPPoE connection to my router, but the transition back to TekSavvy has involved considerable time in trying to negotiate things between NCF and TekSavvy.

Friday, June 1, 2012

DSL transition frustration

Very frustrated with Internet services today.

My DSL service with NCF.ca that was previously a reselling of TekSavvy transitioned to Bell on Tuesday.  I didn't have time to transition direct to TekSavvy, only being told the transition date at the end of the work day last Friday (April 25'th).

Reverse DNS is still not working with Bell, which means email from my servers are likely being rejected as untrustworthy. I have quite a few mailing lists hosted on these servers...


I figured my transition back to TekSavvy was a good time to upgrade service, so I tried to sign up for the DSL25 service which has a 7M uplink.  Seems that this is not available in my location, so I'm signing up with a DSL12 which has a 1M uplink. A 1M uplink is mildly better than the 800K of the current service.

TekSavvy this afternoon contacted me to let me know I had to cancel my current service before TekSavvy could enable the new service.   Funny that there was no permission required to switch to Bell, but that extra paperwork needs to be done to switch away.  I have a cancellation date of June 8 now, which hopefully will allow TekSavvy to get in and have the new service enabled right away.  I'm worried that there will be yet more downtime for my servers.

Wish I knew how quickly NCF was moving to Bell, so I could transition quicker and avoid the extra steps.


I realize Bell is still involved in the last mile of the DSL service, due to the last-mile right-of-way monopolies and all that.  I want to have minimal services from Bell, Rogers, or Telus who I consider to be in conflict of interest with provision of Internet services. I can't avoid them entirely, but I can transition as far away from them as possible. TekSavvy has also shown they are willing to lobby the government to try to minimize the harm from the various monopolies the government has granted BellUsOgers.