We are back up and ready to take your orders again!

I just happened to ping one of our class C's the other day out of frustration and guess what? Something responded. Hmmm...

Instead of adding a route, dudes at our ISP just assigned one to the DSL router. Without mentioning it to us. Nice.

After an hour spent reconfiguring our router, voila! We are live. And after two days of ripping out cables and putting in new ones we are almost ready to go. We're paying careful attention to cable management this time. We've even gone so far as to color code them - blue for primary network connections, another color for secondary, green for management and another for our IP based KVM.

We'll also be adding some databases to our infrastructure. While we're running as close to a real world production environment as possible, there are some things we require in order to support our editorial goals. DB2 is working fine, but we need to be able to test on multiple databases, so we'll be adding SQL Server shortly and, hopefully, one more RDBMS in the next few weeks. We'll replicate data between them to synchronize our corporate data and this should offer a bit more flexibility on the editorial side as well as better representing the real enterprise, which often runs at least 2, if not 3 or more, databases.

So cross your fingers - if all goes well tomorrow we'll be live again by the end of the day.

Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA as a dangerous KaZaA user

• You receive an email from your ISP asking you to update your personal information, including your real name -- Jason Olson
• Your MP3 'sharing' software starts to us SSL to encrypt it's transmissions -- Jason Olson
• Every file, regardless of the title, only plays Sting's "I'll Be Watching You." -- Eric Newsome
• When you do a search on Marilyn Manson the results that come back are 'Diamonds are a girl's best friend' and 'Helter Skelter' -- Jay Eggers
• You get a bill in the mail charging you 99 cents per downloaded track. Total bill... $297000 -- Brian Tunget
• Your ISP forwards you an e-mail from Kazaa congratulating you on your one-millionth download -- Pete Baurer
• Your Kazaa rating changes from "Supreme being" to "Defendant" -- Rick Snaric
• All the usual Orbitz pop up ads have been replaced with ads for defense lawyers -- Rick Snaric
• All of your google searches return links to court summons in pdf format -- Rick Snaric
• Your digital camera takes new pictures when you plug it in to download old pictures -- Brad Davis
• You start getting spam from the U.S. Justice Department -- Kevin Pruett
• You get daily emails encouraging you install Service Pack 3 on your Windows 2000 -- Bryan Shane
• Hillary Rosen starts sending you e-mails at 3 a.m. with embedded WAV files of heavy breathing -- Randy Woods
• You download what you think is the new Chili Peppers album only to find you now have 13 copies of the new Michelle Branch single -- Kurt Loy
• My email used to end with "shaw.ca", suddenly they've changed it to "shawshank.ca" -- Rob Davis
• Your IP address appears on America's Most Wanted -- Mark Jass
• The Kazaa name now reads AhHaa! -- K. Prewett
• You have numerous songs from someone named LIRVA Lavigne -- Travis Rogers
• All of the buttons in KaZaA have changed to "Buy it now!" -- Howard Blair
• You load in your favorite MP3 layout into Nero and all the files are now "Lars Ulrich sings 'Feelings'." -- Howard Blair
• All the spam in your Inbox is from Jack Valenti -- Howard Blair
• You find 2,000 copies of "Hilary Rosen Nude.jpg" in your KaZaA download -- Howard Blair
• CD-shaped crop circles appear in your back yard. (Can I have a glass of water?) -- Howard Blair
• Metallica shows up at your house...and eggs, shaving-creams, and TP's your car -- Howard Blair
• You get kicked of the campus network for downloading the theme song to "spongebob squarepants." -- Ryan Moore
• Bobby Brown, Vanilla Ice, and MC Hammer are picketing outside your home with signs that read, "Piracy doesn't pay my bills." -- Douglas R. Fioto
• You receive a strange request from someone using an excessive amount of outdated hacker wanna-be slang claiming that a friend said you could "hook them up" with the latest Snoop Dog album. -- Patrick Kingsley
• Eminem insults your mother in his next single -- Rod R
• Your computer suddenly has a Tommy Mottola screen saver -- Rod R
• Greta Van Sustern starts taking your calls -- Rod R
• Bill O'Reilly stops taking your calls -- Rod R
• Instead of X10 cameras and Orbitz travel, all of your pop up ads feature Tommy Motola handing you a subpoena -- Benjamin Gerhart
• Every time you go to a file sharing site, a pop-up asks "You know you're breaking the law, don't you?" -- David Petrie
• You use Kazaa and you read in the newspaper that the RIAA has filed 180 million copyright infringement lawsuits -- Steve Fuller
• Your ISP sends you a singing telegram alerting that includes 15 lawyers to explain your rights to the telegram before you listen to it -- Jeff Lynes
• The latest song that was downloaded and played, generously installed riaa.dll on the Windows box -- Gene Barlow
• When you start receiving bills from Columbia House for thousands of CD's.....which is strange since you haven't bought any since 1992.... -- Steve Bruhn
• You need to deposit a nickel into your computer before each song starts -- Fred Swirbul
• You left your house with your computer turned on and KaZaA running, and came home to find it displaying the message "NTOSKRNL.EXE not found - you took our stuff, so we took yours." -- Kevin Gennuso

As always, you can grab the entire contents of the new issue from our RSS feed, or you can browse for stories here.

Also, as you may have noticed, we have added few new features and services to the site this week. Here's a quick rundown:

• Internet Threat Level AlertCon
• eBay Auctions
• Top 11 List: "Real" reasons Microsoft exhibits at open-source trade shows and conferences
• It Minute: Bell Labs veteran Narain Gehani
• This Week @ NWC: the merits and perceived malevolence of steganography
• TechQuiz: Spam Prevention