Yes, faithful reader, it seems that this site’s availability has been far from the proverbial 5-nines. It all seems to trace back to a perhaps careless purchase of a Netgear router. I had been using my G4 tower as a wireless base station fine for about 8 months, but when I finally upgraded the machine to Mac OS Panther, the base station features just vanished. Despite all my best efforts, I could not get the thing to share its connection, even though its airport card worked fine and could use a connection shared out by my Powerbook, if I attached the PB directly to the ISP line.

So anyway, ever since I picked up the router, my internet connectivity has been spotty; I managed to configure it so that the server could keep on serving, at least some of the time, but the thing just falls off sometimes, often in apparent relationship to terminal activity that causes a lot of data (like database queries). I can get the powerbook back online just by power cycling the router, but unfortunately, the tower needs a full-on reboot for some reason.

Anyway, along the way, the ability for machines outside of my home network to reach the server has become intermittent at best. Those of you who care should feel free to help me track external availability since, believe it or not, I don’t read my own blog with any regularity. So if you have trouble getting to the server, drop me a line. Obviously I can’t expect you to leave comments here in that case!