Friday, December 21, 2007

Router Hell

The Barrett data center took another hit yesterday. I knew it had to be something serious when Jan called me at work, as soon as I heard her voice on the phone a million things flashed through my mind. Had someone died, was the house on fire? Jan never calls! No-one had died, but, something equally catastrophic had happened, she could not get on the internet! This is trouble indeed.

Some quick technical support later, it seemed like the router had finally given up the ghost, no lights on it! No problem, and after much cable reagangement we had Jan's puter hooked directly to the modem. Alas it was still a no go. A quick call to the ISP had the problem resolved, damn mac addy!

So, I got home last night, and no sooner had I walked through the door than my daughter came to visit. I explained the network meltdown and she said 'well if you need a router I have a spare'. I said, nah, I have a spare. Well of course my spare, was a router that I have never tested, and guess what, it was dead on arrival!

So a quick call to Laura and she was over again with her spare router. Of course there was a catch, she hands it to me and says "Oh, I have no clue if it works, I bought it at a garage sale for $5". Eek me thinks.

Anyway, it did power up! That was a good start. A little (actually a lot) of fiddling with Mac addresses, DNS's, gateways, and IP's later it is 10:30pm and the data center is restored to its pristine glory!

Ya just got to love computers! Jan of course has a theory about the router going bad, we had worn it out! All those articles on BNN had finally taken their toll!

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