Yesterdays work on the Bolton firewalls and routers resulted in the “arwen” server (tencompetence and designforlearning) disappearing from the internet for much of the day.

There were several colliding issues:

1) The Bolton VPN system had been taken out by the changes so I couldn’t get in remotely to figure out what was going on (I was at the CAA conference in Loughborough). Once informed, the Bolton networks team made it a priority to get it working again.

2) The subnet configuration of the server needed re-applying – Mark Power performed valiantly and got the necessary settings changed from the office in Bolton. This was fixed around lunch-time. The server was now working but only within the Bolton network.

3) The final issue was that Mark Williamson had overlooked the arwen server when configuring the new firewall rules – the other cetis servers were fine though. Once discovered the firewall rules were corrected and the server became publicly visible again at around 5pm.

It was a shame that the tencompetence site went down for the second time in as many weeks, but all in all I think this was pretty much unavoidable given the complexity of the changes, new infrastructure, and I think that both Marks deserve a big thankyou for tackling the matter swiftly and seriously.