As you may have noticed, willemvandenende.com was down over the weekend. The site runs from a webserver in my attic over an ADSL connection. Thursdaynight, heavy lightning struck near my house and in other places in the neighbourhood as well. The KPN did not succeed in fixing everything on friday. Apparently, repair crews worked on other towns during the weekend, so finally on monday a friendly mechanic came by to sort out various problems.

His visit highglighted an interesting problem with layered network architectures. The technician mainly looked at the physical level (is there signal), and knows how to make the phone over ISDN work again as well (KPN mechanics carry spare NT1 boxes for converting line signal to ISDN with them as well). For repairing ADSL I was somewhat left to my own devices. The ADSL modem/router seemed to work - but like the NT1 it didn’t really… Due to the lightning the modem could no longer connect. I found this out because I have a spare ADSL modem handy, due to previous troubles…