All times in 24 hour clock EST/EDT.
May 26 Switched over to using Bell as the main provider. We still have start.ca as a backup.
May 25 Ma Bell came and installed fibre to the house. I
didn't realize they ran fibre through the air... I thought it was
always in the ground. Took them roughly from 12:00 to 16:00.
We are getting about 235 Mb/s down and 160 Mb/s up. They
promised 150/150 so they met that.
May 22 Internet down about 20:30. Link down 21:22.
May 25 Internet came back at 11:00.
May 25 Internet back down at 14:00.
May 25 Internet back up at 15:10.
External IP changed... probably more than one.
January 16 Had to reboot cable router.
October 22 IP changed to 108.168.125.184. Last change was September 25 2019.
Year End The big news for 2020 was the covid-19 pandemic. I have been working from home since mid-March. Because of this, I upped the internet connection to 100Mbps.
October 11 Power went out with a bang at about 18:45. I think something went wrong with the transformer behind the neighbours. Power back at 21:45.
September 8 Internet down from 17:15 to 19:02.
July 28 New battery for Zonker.
May 20 Lost internet between roughly 17:15 and 19:30.
March 23 Hostpapa email went down early in the morning
and was unavailable all day.
March 24 Got a bit of email but still seems to be down.
March 25 At about noon I started getting email again,
but in the evening it stopped.
March 26 Email worked all day and at 22:42 Hostpapa
announced it as completely fixed.
November 15 Internet down again. Had to reboot.
October 11 Came home and the internet was down. Rebooted the router (uptime 110 days) and everything worked again.
September 25 First IP change from 108.168.124.115 to 108.168.124.172.
August 10 Big internet outage. Internet was down or intermittent between 18:00 and midnight.
May 10 Switched from land line to VOIP over cable. I am using a VOIP to analog converter so the existing phone jacks still work.
April 23 With the new faster internet I needed a new faster wireless. Bought a TP-Link Archer AC1200.
Year End The big news for 2018 was the new cable
connection: 30Mbps rather than about 2.5Mbps.
But it came at an emotional price: I lost the static IP
(216.138.233.67) that I have had since I first got broadband in
2000. I also moved all the servers off of YOW. Losing complete
control over my email has been hard.
The upside is that Blackberry now allows me to read my email at
work via web-client (not imap though). I can also send email to
my home account. This was always a sticky point with hosting my
own email in the later years.
On a scarier note, we had three power outages this year. To put
this in perspective, we had three power outages between
September 2001 (when I started keeping track) and 2017. I don't
think we had any outages from 1996 to 2003... Let' hope this was
"just a bad year".
I decided to expand the year end to my home computers in general
rather than just YOW. I bought a new SSD for my main laptop, so
now I am Windows-less.
On a very sad note I dropped XEmacs support. I realized I was
spending a lot of time supporting a platform I am no longer
using. I have been running XEmacs since the mid-90s. But the
last couple of years it was easier to switch to GNU Emacs for
work... and that spread to home.
December 11 Rogers came back and got the cable modem working! It took 7 visits, but it is done. YOW went online with cable at 19:11.
November 30 We got our modem not long after signing up and waited to get it hooked up. The installer came and said there was a problem at the pole. Four visits from Rogers contractors later, we finally have a new cable from the pole to our house. We still do not have internet... but we are closer.
November 24 ADSL BACK! Not sure when since I disabled pppoe this morning while working on some code. When I started it back up this evening it connected! Pretty sure I didn't check Friday night...
November 15 ADSL went down at 17:23:57. There is a good clean dialtone on the line but no ADSL.
November 5 Signed up with start.ca for cable internet. Now have to wait for the modem to be shipped and for an installer.
November 3 Moving all servers off of YOW. Switched to HostPapa for email. Website now just a redirect to Amazon AWS.
September 22 16:30 Power back on! Not quite 24 hours.
September 21 18:00 What was left of Hurricane Florence did a number on Ottawa. We had a half dozen tornadoes caused by the storm and lost power.
August 5 Upgraded the OS on YOW yesterday and today (multiple incremental updates).
May 4 Power went off just before 22:00. I powered off YOW at 22:00 to quiet the UPS. I turned YOW back on just before 10:00. So YOW was off for almost exactly 12 hours.
April 16 Power went off at roughly 10:00 due to an ice storm. At 10:34 I powered off YOW because the UPS beeping was irritating. Power came back about 16:47. YOW was back online at 16:53.
February 14 Got the new battery. YOW was down between about 18:25 and 18:35 whilst I replaced the battery.
February 11 The router rebooted three times today... it turns out the UPS battery is dead again. Ordered a replacement.
January 16 The router rebooted unexpectedly at 6:18 and the pppd exited rather than starting up. There was no internet until I rebooted at about 18:31. It looks like the pppd is not happy if eth0 is not up when it starts.
Year End The big news this year was the new router. I have also moved the seanm.ca domain back to YOW. Not sure if it will stay there.
December 2 At about 14:45 I moved seanm.ca domain back onto YOW. DNS may be unstable for a day or so.
November 4 YOW now "stable" with all major functionality working (including wireless AP).
October 30 At roughly 16:30 I noticed that the disk had crapped out again on the NEXCOM (it was a used disk). Luckily the new PC Engines computer had arrived today. I got the 'Winder working for some internet access and got to work building the new router. At 1:00 I finally got the new router working and live. Still some work to do, but it works.
Older, NEXCOM based status.