Pix down

The great thing about a firewall is that it keeps intruders out. The bad thing about a firewall is, if it goes down, it becomes a brick wall. And that's what happened today.

In my experience, Pixes never go down. Well, today, mine did, and access was lost for five hours. Meanwhile, I was out geocaching, and didn't know. When I got back, my alarms system was reporting six thousand errors, because each server had been unable to talk to the firewall.

I powered it off and on again. The lights flickered, and died. I tried a couple more times, and it didn't get any better. So I powered it off and went to hunt for my spare Pix 506E.

Eventually, I found it in one place,, and the power supply in another. When I brought them togather, I found out why I'd done that - the Pix worked, but the power supply didn't.

Oops.

Then I powered on the Pix that had failed, and it came alive, and stayed alive. So I dont know what's wrong there. But I do know this - I need a spare, so I've ordered a new power supply from Ebay, and also a new Pix 506E plus power supply; if I get both, I'll have two spares!

And when I switch from using a colocation to using a 100 mbit feed, I'll have two more spares, because at that point, I'm planning not to use a 506E. I have a 525 and a 515 ready to roll.