Earlier, our internet just stopped working. It’s been pretty reliable, but it has occasionally gone down briefly so I didn’t panic. After over an hour, though, I thought I’d better call the ISP. They, of course, asked if I’d tried turning it off and on again. Of course, I had. Twice. They then attempted to reset it remotely and failed. They said the only option is to have a technician come out.
Of course, this was Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, a major four-day-weekend holiday in the US. So the tech won’t be here until Monday.
I guess this is backup infrastructure week at twoprops’ compound. First we had to switch from municipal water to our catchment system. Now, we’ve had to switch to a satellite backup for internet. That done, I decided to scout the neighborhood and look for signs of physical damage to the cable. The water department has been using heavy equipment. Perhaps they snagged a line?
It wasn’t the water department, but I did find damage. A tree had fallen on our local drop (from the pole to the house) and had broken a strip of the fascia board to which the cable was attached, and severed the cable completely as it fell.
The intact cable at the top is a copper phone line, which hasn’t been used in years. The fiber internet cable is hanging off of the torn-off length of fascia board on the right side of the picture. The severed end (pictured at the top of the page) is hanging off that board.
I’ll have work to do tomorrow to try to route the mail server through the carrier-grade NAT the satellite system uses, but I’m confident WireGuard can do the job.
—2p