We have a network monitoring system here at Reinvented. It’s not exotic, but it does allow us to keep track of services running on both our own machines, and on our clients’ machines in several sites (for those of you that are curious, we use the open-source Nagios package).

The first step in checking to see whether a remote server is “alive” is to send it something called a “ping” which is the electronic equivalent of sending a “hello, are you there?” message over the wire and listening for the “yes, I’m here” message back.

If our monitor can send a ping and receive back a response, it knows that the remote server is online, and then proceeds to send it more complex messages like “is your webserver running?” and “is your disk full?”

Without a successful response to the initial ping, however, our monitor assumes that the remote server is dead in the water, and it proceeds to do all sort of crazy emergency-like behaviour like emailing us and paging us and generally waving its arms in the air to grab our attention to the problem.

It’s a system that’s worked well for several years, and we rely on it to offer our clients good service.

Until today.

Today, without telling anyone, Aliant, our upstream bandwidth provider, decided to turn off the ability for us to generate outgoing or incoming pings. In essense, they are filtering out all “ping traffic.”

So when our network monitor tries to send a ping to anywhere on the Internet, the entire network appears to be “dead in the water.” And so the system starts emailing us and paging us and generally waving its arms in the air to grab our attention to the problem.

I called Aliant’s technical “support” line this afternoon, and was told that this move was taken because of the various Microsoft-related viruses and worms that were released last week — apparently the increase in network traffic caused by the viruses and worms prompted them to filter network traffic to try and deal with the problem.

Fair enough.

But they neither told me, their customer relying on this service that they were going to do this, nor can they offer any estimated timing on the removal of this filtering beyond “when the virus problem has cleared up.”

I’ve asked them to remove the ping filtering from my subnet, but they claim to not be able to do this.

And they seem perplexed that anyone would actually rely on the ability to ping as a business tool.

I’m so goddammed angry at these idiots at Aliant that I want to scream. Fortunately I don’t need to scream: I’m switching bandwidth providers this week, part of a gradual and determined de-Aliant-ification of my life.

Another month or two, once I’ve switched cell phone and land-line providers, I’ll be totally free of Aliant’s unique approach to customer dis-service, and able to conduct business without worrying about crap like this.

Sorry about the strong words, but from PEINet to Island Tel to Aliant, I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours banging my head against faceless technologists who have neither the skill to execute their duties, nor the compassion to admit this. I count myself extremely lucky to have an alternative bandwidth provider to fall back on, one where a real person answers the phone, and where I can go camp on the owner’s doorstep until problems are solved.

Mick Jagger is on Charlie Rose tonight. Check your local PBS listings.

Try this: go to the UPEI Webcam page and click on the “time lapse from beginning of construction” link. As a longtime webcam maintainer, I stand in awe of both their ability to keep their camera running, and their ability to keep it in the same place for so long. It’s a great tour through Island winter, spring and summer.

Back at the beginning of August, we ended up taking an accidental trip to Quebec City when a “short weekend away” got out of hand. We travelled to Moncton, then up the eastern side of New Brunswick through Campbellton into Quebec, then to Rimouski, and from Rimouski down the St. Lawrence to Quebec City. 

Highlights of the trip were:

• Savonnerie Olivier
• Amqui, Quebec (especially the playground)
• Museum in Rimouski
• The Quebec City Zoo
• Old Quebec City

My last visit to Quebec City was when I was 19. I’d just dropped out of university, and I was hitchhiking to the east coast. Catherine had never been, and she’d always dreamed of it, so when the weekend opportunity arrived, and we were pointed in the right direction, we seized the day. It’s a wonderful city, well worth a visit for anyone within a couple of days driving (which is a lot of people in North America). It’s about as European a city as you’ll find without crossing the Atlantic.

Most of my family has left now, though Johnny and Jodi from Vancouver are around for another 12 hours until they fly back in the morning at the insane time of 5:50 a.m. Thus closes a family-packed week, most of which was spent at a rented cottage in Canoe Cove.

Highlights?

We all enjoyed go-carting, both at North River, and slightly zippier and slightly longer, at Burlington Amusement Park. The Do Duck Petting Farm was its usual wonderful self — this is, I think, the single best attraction for children on Prince Edward Island.

On the same trip to the north shore, we walked along the beach at Cousins Shore, had dinner at the New London Seafood Restaurant (excellent service, good food).

Otherwise there was a lot of walking along the beach (and, for Oliver, swimming around, tethered to one uncle or aunt or grandparent or another), drinking of beer (recommendation: get a keg from the Gahan House; good, handy form for beer, and works out to about a dollar a pint, Johnny says) and eating both in and out (including an excellent pasta meal cooked by Johnny and Jodi).

Perhaps the wisest decision was to rent a cottage duplex rather than One Big Cottage. This gave everyone their own personal space, and let us split into sub-groups when it made sense. The cottage we rented is owned by the Trainor family (their main base of operations is in Hampton, where they’re known as Hampton Haven Cottages). The duplex was clean, well equipped, and had uncommonly comfortable beds (better than most hotels). The location, about 500 feet from the beach, across from Camp Keir, can’t be beat.

Sometimes it’s good to slip into the tourist role for a while, even if you live here fulltime; helps put the tourism industry in perspective. Having been in Boston, New Hampshire, New Brunswick and Quebec in the past month, I can say without hesitation that the people and facilities of the Island tourism industry are a cut above the rest.

Now, onwards and upwards towards fall…

Maybe I’m late to the party on this scam, but here’s what happened to me tonight: my cell phone rang, with a very long number showing up as the “caller ID” on the display. When I answered it became obivous from the echo that it was an international call, and looking up the number later, it looks like it might have come from Ghana.

On the other end of the line was a fuzzy voice, asking me to call another number, also seemingly in Ghana. After telling me to call the number, the caller rung off.

I called Aliant Mobility, and poked around the Internet a little for more information, and the general idea here seems to be that if I were to call back the number in Ghana (or whereever), I would incur incredible long distance charges.

Oddly enough, a few minutes later a call came in on my office line from a number seemingly in France (country code of 33, or maybe 133), and the caller hung up without leaving a message.

Aliant took the call details, and promised to report the call to the fraud department there. They did advise not to return the call, which is common sense.

And it used to be just email we had to be afraid of…

Halfway through my first (and ultimately only) year of university, I stopped attending classes so as to better facilitate reading every one of Robertson Davies’ novels. This was less exotic than stopping to drink large quantites of beer, but healthier.

Getting turned on to Davies’ Jungian thing was hardly very useful when it came time to take my Psychology 101 exam. Sample conversation with professor: “What would happen if I wrote my essay about Jung rather than Freud?” I asked. “You would fail,” he replied. “If I failed, could I appeal?” I asked. “Yes, to the head of the department,” he replied. “Who’s that?” I asked. “Me,” he replied.

In any case, Davies turned on the “wonder of coincidence” switch in my brain, and I’ve been a coincidence addict ever since.

Today a big coincidence hit my email box — actually an interlocked set of mini-coincidences. I’m still parsing. The entire continent is involved. I will document, diagram and post as soon as I can digest it all.

Which has got me thinking that it would be very interesting if coincidences were reported like the weather. I would love to see a coincidence map of the world that would allow coincidental happenings to be tracked, outbreaks of coincidence to be monitored, etc.

Have I missed something? I’m getting flooded with spam titled, variously, “Thank You,” “Re: Details,” and “Re: Wicked Screensaver” with a message body of “See the attached file for details” and an attached Windows .PIF or .SCR file that appears to contain a DOS program. I’ve received 166 copies of this email, from people all over the world, in the last 24 hours.

You wouldn’t believe how much more fun go-carting is when you are racing against your three brothers. We all did 12 laps at North River causeway this afternoon. Maximum fun was had by all.

Speaking of travel, Edward Hasbrouck, who has good weekly commentary on the Amazing Race, has a page called I couldn’t take a big trip like that, because… on his website which is a good roadblock buster if you’re secretly itching to travel, but always manage to find reasons not to.

Like my mother says, “the last shirt has no pocket.”