Yesterday I wasn't able to log into my home server from the office, and I assumed the load had skyrocketed again, as it happens every now and then. Timing was quite bad because I'm very busy in the evenings these days, but I went to my father's house to see what was going on, and when I got there I saw the server was mostly idling. WTF? Shortly after I noticed my local named wouldn't resolve barely anything, and I couldn't ssh out, as the connection would hang in the middle of the handshakes. I started looking at my 3com router configuration, seemed ok; rebooted the box, nothing changed; started cursing, which changed nothing either... until I realized it was probably a telco thing. I told my father "it'll probably be fixed automagically" and left the house.

When I came back from training, I managed to ssh in and quickly tested the downstream speed. As I suspected, the downtime was caused by Telefónica tweaking our stuff to upgrade the ADSL's of the area from 256/128 to 512/128. Uplink still sucks, but oh well, we got this for "free" (ie, we still pay way to much for crappy connections in Spain, but we're slowly getting what the rest of Europe seems to have).

Moreover, today the cable company finally opened up the street and installed their stuff to offer their service. 5 or 6 years late...