Cable cut leaves LSNet and many others in the dark

We worked back through the chain and found we were blocked upstream.

A call to Comcast suggested "Node Congestion". A couple of hours later the failure was reported to be a cut cable in Woodlawn, Virginia.

Not much to do but fold your hands and wait.

Internet connected resumed at about 5:15AM Saturday morning.

Cloud computing (Amazon EC2) looks compelling. We've started an engineering plan. We will pursue that with increased vigor. There will be some heavy uploading into the cloud measured in days. Configuration of a "machine image" will require much thought and testing.

One of the consequences will be a shift to more secure protocols in communicating with the "cloud". That includes replacing FTP with SFTP. Instead of using a password to connect you will have two keys, one installed on your machine and another on the server. Each computer you use to connect to the server will require its own pair of keys. Detailed instructions to follow.