sorry for yet more downtime, all i can ascertain is the ip has changed and perhaps the ISP cut off the connection before that happened
from looking at smoothwall traffic logs i can see the connection died totally at approx 4AM in the morning, and was only resurected by a forced hard reboot of the firewall at 8pm or so. This action caused the smoothwall to ask for an ip address and it was handed a new one. What happened at 4AM i don't know, but based on the fact that the server was down the very day before (due to ISP issues) leads me to believe the ISP was in the process of some more spring cleaning which they hoped no one would notice
as I was not around to monitor it I couldn't be sure
it's up again now, and the new DNS entrys are propogated
hopefully that's the last downtime problems for this year
sorry again for any inconvenience
cheers
anyweb