t-offline

Parts of Serversniff.net are offline. Lightning stroke friday evening.

The Domain-Database and some Utilities are hosted at my attic - a diskarray and a desktop-pc running beteween stored camping-equipment, Skates, old books and old electronics and cables, all connected via DSL, operated by german monopolist-telco Deutsche Telekom.

I live in a rural area with occasional thunderstorms and lightning strikes near my house every now and then. I might have got a bad line: Whenever a lightning strikes near my line, i'm offline. No Phone, no DSL, no Internet. It's dead, Jim.

No, don't even think about Telekom monitoring the lines functionality. You'll have to contact their callcenter - by phone or internet. If you're lucky, you get a nice phone-computer, and after repeating "STÖRUNG" again and again unless the shitty machine understands, you will hear that all lines are busy. I had this Friday, i had this Saturday, i had this Sunday - about a hundred calls, unless i finally got through sunday afternoon.

The phone-computer-odyssee continues: you have to enter your phone-number twice. Again, you have to confirm the number by yelling YESYESYES and you have to confirm the AreaCode by yelling YESYESYES and then you get a nice lady that is able to tell you, yeah, the line is dead ("lady, thats why I am calling!!"), and yeah, she will appoint this to a technician, but , oh well, Deutsche Telekom is on strike. Yeah, Tuesday morning.

It'll be like it was the times before: The technican will replace a fuse in the local switch-unit, call in to say that everything's fine again, and the familiy will have phone and internet again.

I do pay around €100 a month for phone and internet - this is defintely not the service i expect for ~1.000 Bucks a year - but since Telekom is still the only one to provide infrastructure where i live, things will stay like this until i find a place to colocate serversniffs backend for electricity-costs only. If you can offer space (no need for a rack, just around 1 MBit connectivity) you're welcome to drop me a mail at thomas.springer@serversniff.net.

Until then you might experience a few outages during thunderstorm-season in our german summer. If you're annoyed by the outage, please keep in mind: It's a free service.

tom