And Let There Be Routable Packets

Our world is slowly coming back into order this afternoon after our DSL router bit the dust last night. The withdrawal pains were rough, but the Smarter Half and I made it through. I found another dealer, er, IP address over at a local coffee shop for a few minutes to kick off an email earlier today. This made the morning easier to deal with...

This afternoon the Smarter Half made it to Fry's and got a Diamond Multimedia DSL router. Who knew they made DSL routers? Anyway, after a little bit of struggling we got the thing to work. I was initially looking forward to having a built-in NAT, VPN, Firewall thingie(tm) but in the end we turned it into a bridge and dropped the old Netgear NAT/Firewall back into place. It turns out that the router doesn't support multiple "outside" IP addresses or any kind of 1:1 NAT which meant I'd have to wait until midnight for my mail server to come back online. A non-starter given that it had been offline since yesterday evening.

We need to revisit the closet this weekend anyway. The shelves are full of old gear that has probably outlived its usefulness (unless of course you know someone looking for an ISA sound card...) and I'd like to get a few things fixed up on the household network side. The Netgear NAT is 7 years old now -- I'd like to beat it to the punch before it kicks the bucket too.