The Plucked Chicken is not professionally hosted, and relies upon our home DSL connection. It’s never been really fast DSL, but it’s been reasonably reliable. Most of the time. It seems now that our ISP is making some changes to their DSL setup in this area. I need to call them back to find out exactly what and schedule a time for them to stop by and update things. I’m guessing it’s a new DSL modem.
Anyway, since we received that message, our current DSL modem has been losing its DSL link intermittently. It actually requires a modem reboot for it to reacquire the link. So, if you can’t get to the Chicken at some point, don’t worry too much. I hope that things will return to normal next week.
It’s just possible that these changes will hamper my ability to host the Chicken. Many ISPs seem to push asynchronous bandwith with blocked ports, turning their customers from fully-fledged (no pun intended) Internet citizens into mere end-users or consumers of content, with no possibility of participating in the production of content (hosting web sites, etc.). I really hope that our ISP (Gorge Net) won’t try to herd us farther in that direction. We already have asynchronous bandwidth, and that’s not helping anything. If you find that the Chicken is down for an extended time, this too-common, misguided ISP philosophy may be the problem.