Friday, January 9, 2015

I fought the web ………

………… and I won.  With apologies to Sonny Curtis and The Clash, tonight for your listening pleasure I bring you a classic from my university years.

Last night I decided it was time to pull the plug on Homestead email.  I went to bed confident that I had managed to move my email from Homestead (AKA Worst ISP in the Universe) to GoDaddy.  At the same time I uploaded all the files for my new and improved personal website but I left the DNS pointing to the Homestead server. 

This morning I woke up full of piss and vinegar so I elected to pull the plug on Homestead’s web server as well.  I’m not sure whether my email was working and I broke it or whether it never really worked.  Either way, I spent the rest of the day getting it working.  I could always receive email which I why I’m not 100% certain that it wasn’t broken last night.  I may just not have noticed that I wasn’t sending anything.

Whatever the exact situation, by early afternoon I was desperate enough to actually phone support.  That was pretty much a waste of time although I think they did have to be involved.  There was some server re-sync that they did which I think helped but it certainly wasn’t the whole solution.  We actually discovered a bigger disconnect while I was on support and then the support droid kept trying to steer me back to what I had initially phoned about.  We had a bizarre situation where I could log into their webmail if I went through their links from their homepage but if I tried to open a browser directly to their email I would get diverted to some unknown Open Exchange server.  That behaviour went away after he did his re-sync thing.

By mid afternoon I had no ability to send email at all – nothing from my Android, nothing from Outlook and their web interface wouldn’t send either.  It still won’t send from IE but it will work from FireFox.  Late in the afternoon I finally blew up my email account on their server, created a couple of dummy accounts and then recreated the exact account that I had blown up.  That seemed to get the constipation in their servers moving along and its mostly working now.  I still haven’t tackled the Android – I suppose that will be my blood pressure stimulant for the evening. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that I thought I’d take a break and change the cam position sensor on the Lincoln.  That went well until I tried to put the connector back on.  The old plastic must have been too brittle in this miserable cold.  The little tab that is supposed to hold the connector on fell off as I was trying to reattach the connector.  I bodged that with two zip ties and a short piece of plumbing strap.  Time will tell how well that works but I think it will be OK.  I supposed I should try to find a new connector but that seems like it could quickly turn into an ordeal.

It was just one of those days.

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