Tonight I had the rare joy of a successful and (relatively) quick re-configuration at BitRelay. Usually when I go to my co-location facility to upgrade a piece of hardware or reconfigure the firewall or whatever, something that should take five minutes ends up taking several hours.
I’m in the process of moving all my servers and equipment to a new facility, where the infrastructure is much more robust. It’s all part of the business maturing from its original fly-by-night operation into a truly professional hosting company. I’m excited for the change (although it’s going to be somewhat complicated to keep a hundred clients up and running during the switch).
So anyway, tonight I was installing my new firewall. The one I had, graciously sold to me by Chancellor, definitely had some troubles. I’d attempted to install it on two occasions at BitRelay, failing both times, and still couldn’t get it running even at home. With the Big Move only a week and a half away, I was suddenly in dire straits because I needed a serious firewall to replace the $2,500 paperweight I had.
Enter my pal Warren, who had a used one he was willing to part with for a song. (A thousand thanks, Warren!) It’s a high-end model, somewhere in the $4,500 range, and it’s one of those pieces of equipment that’s so powerful and has so many features that it’s dizzying just looking at it. I took the plunge nonetheless, dropping it on the new network and poking around the management interface until I figured out how to route the right network traffic. Voila, I’m in business.
Amazingly, things went right on the first try– instead of the tenth, as is my usual wont. Now I’ve got a week or so to comfortably configure all of the right settings, and then move the rest of my servers.
Movin’ up in the world!