At least, I hope it’s fixed.
I’ve had a recurring problem for a while now, where at seemingly random times, I’d lose my connection to the ‘net. It seems that this is some sort of odd problem with my Linksys router. Since I host this domain (and three others) off of one of my computers here in my apartment, I’ve had my LAN isolated behind the Linksys router (as seen in this diagram).
Unfortunately, for some reason, every so often when I’m browsing my own website from any machine on my LAN, the Linksys router will freeze up. Since it sat between my computers and the outside world, this effectively killed my network connection. I’d recently upgraded the firmware of the router to the latest version, hoping that it would fix the problem — unfortunately, that seemed rather to exacerbate the difficulties, where the Linksys proceeded to randomly freeze while browsing my website even if I was using a computer outside my LAN.
Needless to say, this is quite annoying. Especially on days like today, when it froze at five in the afternoon, and I wasn’t able to come home and restarted until after I got off work at 9pm.
However, my account with Speakeasy allows me two static IP addresses. I got ahold of them, got my second IP address configured, and rewired my network (here’s the new diagram) to take the Linksys out from between the webserver and the world.
Technically, this is a little less secure, as there is now a direct line between my webserver and the world, with no intervening firewall for protection, but OS X is fairly secure, and I’m willing to take that slight risk if it allows my sites to have better uptime. The Linksys does still protect the PC, however. Somehow I just can’t justify leaving a Windows box open to the world, even if I think I’ve got it locked down. So much for ‘trusted computing‘.