GOOCHONLINE - Since 1999

Nerd...

Confessions

Today, when my site and the sites of several other people went down along with email service, I was to blame.

You see, most machines nowadays have software, actually called firmware installed within them. Firmware tells a microwave how long a potato should be cooked, when to start a VCR, and it tells a DVD player how to access special features of a DVD.

The GoochOnline.com network, located in the Gooch Compound, consists of computers, cables, and routers (the italics are important later). When you type in a web address like http://www.goochonline.com (also known as a URL), your computer ultimately is sending a packet of information out onto the internet requesting the default page at the IP address of 216.99.209.210 at port 80 with a host header of www.goochonline.com (try typing in "http://216.99.209.210:6969 and you'll hit my webcam, if it's on. Before the "goochonline.com" portion of the packet you sent get read, it hits a router at my office. That router tells everything sent to port 80 at my IP address, to go to my web server. The web server then reads the "goochonline.com" portion of the request that you sent and sends the default page of goochonline.com back to your computer.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not much more.

(It all comes together here)

I decided to upgrade the firmware on my router today. I knew that upgrading my router would add functionality and security to the appliance that has served me for a better part of a year. What I didn't know is that the upgrade would erase the multitude of settings I had in place. Once the upgrade was done, I had a better router, but all of my settings were gone.

Shit.

In what could be described as the equivalent to a mother lifting a car off of her child, I hastily reconfigured the router and things I didn't know that I knew came into play as I successfully redid the heart of my wide area (WAN) and local area (LAN) network.

Unfortunately, the goochonline.com empire of websites always will work for me, since I'm on the safe side - the inside of the router. Outside the router (for example, the rest of the world) was inaccessible. What I didn't know is that the new firmware had another new page of configurations that I missed, delaying full functionality. Thirty seconds after I discovered the new page of configurations, I was back among the living.

There, you've learned a little bit about the internet, my incompetence, and yourselves. It's nights like this where I sleep with my Commodore 64.