Yesterday, one of my DSL providers ran afoul of a backhoe which severed its OC3. The bad news was that a bunch of customers, me included, learned that we had no redundant path to the backbone -- at least not through this provider. (This is one reason why I maintain a separate circuit through a different provider; that one was unaffected.) The good news was that the fiber got spliced together very quickly, and the provider was really, really sorry and really, really proactive. I got calls from three people alerting me to the outage, and calls from four other people notifying me that it was cleared. In a situation like that, there's no such thing as overcommunicating.
Hence this note. If you haven't heard from me in a few days but think you should have, it's not because of that fiber cut. Apparently my home mail server, to which my InfoWorld mail is forwarded, tightened up its reverse DNS lookup policy. It could resolve the domain, but not the specific hostname/domain. That's been corrected now on our end (thanks, Kevin), and I hope the queued messages will transfer today.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/06/22.html#a1026