It is, of course, insane to live without Internet. It also made my
bittercon participation impossible.I have one PC working (which is how I'm posting) but don't have the whole home network (with router) working so I'm still slaving away at that. Not sure when I'll be fully up yet, but hopefully getting closer.
I work for HP and have done many networking things in the past, so I'm pretty savvy. I was even breaking out the software protocol analyzer to figure out what was happening on the connection from the ISP.
When it died I did the usual things: reboot the home router, reboot the ISP's Residential Gateway and router, try a direct connection from the Residential Gateway to the PC, etc. No luck.
So I called my ISP, Surewest. I will say that the Surewest people have been great and very very helpful. Sunday night we thought it was a problem with my router so I added the associated MAC of my PC to the allowed MACs for my connection. No luck Sunday night or Monday morning (allowing time for system reload, etc).
Of course, the possibility of Surewest techs coming by Monday meant I had to clean up the giant book/magazine mess that was the floor of the office. That took Sunday night.
Monday morning, once I talked to the level 2 tech, I found out it was a subnet problem on the subnet that served my line (multiple people having this issue). Essentially, the subnet router was out of dynamic IP addresses. Hey, maybe that's why the DHCP request didn't work! They said they were fixing the issue and to give it 30 minutes.
30 minutes later, I had a network connection on my PC. Joy! Now to try to get my router working. This seemed like a great time to use the new 11g router (I had an ancient 11b router that was getting flaky).
Of course, due to MAC filtering just putting the router on the connection from the ISP Will Not Work. But the router has "MAC Spoofing". So set the router to spoof the MAC of the PC. Not working. A couple resets, a couple reinitialization, not working. PC still works.
Router (from Linksys) has a firmware upgrade available. Some of the bugs listed as "fixed" have to do with DHCP address acquisition. Hmmm. Get the firmware upgrade and upgrade the firmware.
That's where I am now, ready to try everything again. I just briefly logged on to glimpse the Internet for a second before heading back into non-net darkness.
ETA: That was it! Router with updated firmware for the win. Everything works including VPN back to work. Finally...
ETA: It is done. Home network active, all computers running, and we are now .11g in the house. And the books/magazines are off the floor! I have the win!
