My father-in-law is a computer engineer (embedded systems design) and runs his corporate servers (web, email, etc.) from his house, using a static IP address and a DSL connection. For the next three months, however, he is living and working in Akron, OH, so isn’t around to maintain the system. Because he’s sure that the system will go down at some point in the next three months — power outage, hurricane, whatever — and because he doesn’t want to burden anyone (namely me) with having to maintain the system — it’s an older Sun and I’m certainly not that good at Solaris…I can boot it up and check simple things, but that’s about it — he decided to buy colo service from his ISP, atlantic.net. (I’m not going to link them out of frustration, which will be explained in a few moments) It costs more than renting a dedicated server, but it’s far easier to set up. All someone has to do is to physically move the machine from his house to their data center, less than two miles north. Enter me.

He arranged all of the details of the move with someone at atlantic.net and my job last night was to shut down the machine, drive it to their data center, and bring it back up. Not a big deal. In fact, he even shut it down remotely, so that part of the job was taken care of. I go over to the house about 7:40 last night and make sure the system is down, then call the 800-number for atlantic.net to let them know I’m coming over. The data center is open 24/7, but it’s after normal business hours so I figured I’d just make sure someone was there and available. No problem. The engineer I talked to was very friendly and helpful, knew about the transfer, and all was well. “Do you know where we’re located,” he asked me as we were concluding our conversation. “I sure do,” I overconfidently replied, since we had done this move at least once before, after all of the hurricanes a few years ago. I lug the box out to the car, grab a keyboard, and hit the road.

Five minutes later, I’m at the building. Sure enough, the atlantic.net logo is still on the building sign, so all systems are go. The engineer said that there’d be a call box I’d have to use to call them, and they’d come down and escort me in. No problem. Well, no problem until I can’t find a call box. As the primary part of the building is a bank, I don’t want to act too suspicious by rattling all of the exterior doors so I call the engineer back. “No problem. I’ll come down and let you in. Are you at the main entrance?”

“I guess so. I’m by the drive-through.”

“Be right down.”

Five minutes later, nobody has shown up. My phone rings. “I just went downstairs and didn’t see you. Where are you again?”

“By the entrance,” I reply, getting rather concerned at this point. “You’re still in the bank building, right?”

“The what? Bank building? What street are you on?”

“13th street.”

“13th? No, we’re out on Kennedy Boulevard.” Kennedy Boulevard? There’s no Kennedy Boulevard in Gainesville. “You must be somewhere downtown.”

“Not really,” I reply, warily. “Where are you again?”

“13th street? You must be in downtown Orlando…”

“Um, no. I’m in Gainesville.” D’oh.

So, you see, it turns out that they had closed the Gainesville data center “years ago,” and apparently the salesman my father-in-law talked to neglected to mention that detail, and either didn’t hear or ignored him when he said that he’d like to colo in Gainesville. How terrible! How amusing now, after the fact, but how frustrating!

I call my father-in-law back and explain to him the problem, then drive the machine back to their house. He’s frustrated, I’m frustrated. Not terribly fun. I manage to get the box back to the house and running — not before a fsck had to be run, naturally — and we were eventually back online. He got concerned while I was running the check that he couldn’t ping the router, so he was convinced that the whole system was shot. Somehow, magically, it repaired itself once Timucuan, the server, came back online, but the end of the story is that he’s frustrated with and angry at atlantic.net and I’ve wasted the evening shlepping the Sun box around town. Which is not light, I might add. Oh well. It seemed like a good plan, but I really should have learned that nothing goes easily when it comes to his computer system. Nothing is quite as straightforward as it ever seems it should be.

Emma thought the story was very funny, incidentally, when I finally got home. “Why,” I asked her, “do I ever think that working on his computer is going to be as easy as it sounds?”

“Because you’re gullible?” :-D