Why hosting at home is hard

I was offline for nearly forty-eight hours this week because I was up in San Francisco and busy, therefore mostly oblivious. My family was also offline (which I got a lot of feedback on when I arrived home). This is the first time since we moved to DSL that it's happened (it happened a couple times with the cable connection). So everything was kinda dark and it lasted a couple days (I had problems when I tried to hit the net before leaving for the Airport very early on Monday morning, but no time to deal with it). All it took was a reset on the part of Covad, but the required talking to a support rep which meant a phone call.

I am now going to need to figure out how to shuffle things around so that I am truly running a bridging system between the cable modem and the DSL connection. If I can put the rest of the family on a network that uses cable for most traffic, redirects other traffic (based on a port list of some sort) to DSL and can fail all traffic to DSL when cable dies, that would be close to ideal. I thought I was mostly there, but now I'm not so sure. I need to do some poking around.

Strange things we worry about these days when we go away on a trip...