WordPress Upgrades and Comcast Update

First, the comcast update. For some reason, the gateway Comcast provided (i.e. modem + firewall +?) appeared to be interfering with our existing firewall. After about 8 trouble tickets has been opened on the issue (Why did they close the first one?), Comcast agreed to replace the gateway with a simple modem in May. Since that time, our internet connection has been extremely stable. This is good to know since I live 30 miles from the school and I don't go in to campus regularly during the summer. I didn't want to be spending my summer resetting the gateway every couple of days. I am not sure what the exact cause was as we were using pretty generic hardware for the firewall. For this we were running Untangle software, which I have fallen in love with. I hated the thought that I might have to ditch it as a result of these network issues. I am thrilled that I don't have to.

Last night, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade our school's website from WordPress 2.7.1 to 2.8.2. Following the advise of blogs like Karen Blundell's, I backed up the database and deactivated my plugins. The automatic upgrade worked sell. The only glitch was that I use custom permalinks and the control panel could not update my .htaccess file. The result was the 500 Internal Error. Unfortunatley, after giving this file WORLD permissions in the cpanel, WordPress did not correctly update this file for my permalinks. NOW, all I got was a 404 error when accessing any of my blog files.

To solve this, I accessed my blog files via FTP, showing my hidden files. In the /blog directory, I found the .htaccess file, backed it up locally then deleted it. That got me access to the WordPress admin pages again. YES!! From there, I copied the code which was suggested by the Settings > Permalinks page as follows:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

I placed the code into the .htaccess file and this fixed the problem. SUCCESS!!

As I looked again at the corrupted .htaccess file, I discovered that the code was copied in by WordPress with incorrect line breaks resulting in bad code. It took me some time to figure all this out so solving this issue was a major coup for me. Thanks to the bloggers who covered this issue.

Comcast Chaos

We have had continuous conncection issues with Comcast here at the school. The folks at Comcast were very responsive when I called them Wednesday and came out the same day replaced our gateway/modem. Things went swimmingly Thursday and Friday. This morning, however, some serious connection problems arose with inconsistant results loading pages. When I called them, they indicated that there was an outage in our area and that they were working to solve the problem. I was thrilled to know that, at least, I was not OUR equipment.

By 11AM, I decided to reset the modem/gateway by powercycling it. So far, all is well. In fact, as the figure below shows, our speed seems to be reaching previous levels measured after the Boost feature was launched last May. Nice job, Comcast!

Comcast Cares

An interesting thing happened a couple hours after my last post and a similar notice posted on Twitter regarding this issue; I was contacted by ComcastBill on Twitter asking if I needed any help. I hadn't had a chance to contact tech. support so this pre-emptive contact on their part was a pleasant surprise. I replied with my experience (see previous post) and that I would like to have the line tested. Unfortunately, I had already left school for the weekend and would not return until this past Wednesday due to an illness early in the week. My reply was recieved after ComcastBill had left the office so ComcastBonnie (on Twitter) followed up.

When I returned to school last Wednesday, I ran a few tests on the network to see if the issues had cleared up. So far, the disconnection issues have not returned. Our speed seems to have returned to expected levels too (see below).

I don't know how long Comcast has been doing tech. support via Twitter but I love the idea. Saves me time on the phone. Also, while I have no direct knowledge that they actually changed anything on their network, at least their AWARENESS of the issue has resulted in better connection quality. Thanks, Comcast!!

What's Happening?

Over the last the days, our internet connection has been spotty. The firewall appears to be handling the load (50 total nodes) with no problem, but at times, webpages fail to load. I powercycled the the cable modem yesterday, which seemed to help but the Internet is still sluggish. I ran another speedtest and came up with the following results...





Compare this to the result I blogged about last May when they launched their Boost feature.



While I realize this is not scientific, at the time I ran today's test all students and teachers were in the mulitpurpose room for an assembly. Only a couple of office staff could have been online at the time. Pings work internally with no problem but sometimes don't hit the internet. Something is fishy. What's up, Comcast?

Comcast Boost Realized

I've been hearing about Comcast business customers getting a speed boost but I hadn't seen that happening on our connection. Today, I received a letter from Comcast indicating that our connection speed, previously 8Mb/1Mb, had been doubled both downstream and up speeds. The letter also indicated that I might need to do a hard reset on the cable modem to see the new speeds. So, I reset the modem and, sure enough, we are getting faster speeds that we were previously set up for, though I have never seen us near the cap from a workstation on our network (but who's complaining). Nice! Great for a school on an ever DECREASING budget.

I had also heard about a Power Boost feature to give you a quick boost on your first 100 MB (or something like that). The letter I received did not go into specifics but did refer to such a feature.

We will be upgrading our servers soon. More posts to come on that. Stay tuned!