use Perl

I have to say, I'm impressed.

Today, my home internet connection was migrated from (the now defunct) @Home to Comcast. I have been plagued by emails, live-person telephone calls, computerized telephone calls, little bits of snail mail - all of which I have viewed with a large amount of skepticism. "Sure, they'll get it right the first time. More likely I'll be offline for a week or two. Time to dig out that old AOL '1000 hours free' disk I've been saving and find a phone cord long enough to reach up 2 flights of stairs."

Well, last week I configured my home firewall to use DHCP (in preparation for the move) and today found that my connection was down, the migration was complete. Ok, watch this....

# /etc/syconfig/network-scripts ifdown eth1
# /etc/syconfig/network-scripts ifup eth1
# ifconfig -a

scribble down my new (DHCP but static) IP address
edit my iptables script and ifcfg-eth1 to my new IP

# /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall
# /etc/syconfig/network-scripts ifdown eth1
# /etc/syconfig/network-scripts ifup eth1
# ping www.google.com

Damn if my internet connection didn't pop right back up. I'm still in disbelief. It would have been even easier if I had left the config as DHCP, but I have everything set up for a static IP and a caching nameserver and don't have time to pour through HOWTOs to figure out how to make DHCP work properly.

Anyway, whatever Comcast did, they managed to leave me with virtually no downtime. My own particular company (who shall remain nameless) has migrated thousands of customers from bankrupt ISPs to our little operation, every time loosing customers and having some unscheduled outage.

Guess I should have applied to Comcast when they were hiring in the area, see how folks with their act together behave.

On the down side, I can picture my next bill...

Because your migration to our service was seemless and professional, we have imposed a $10 per-month increase in your current plan, starting with your next billing period...