I'm back from plunging the depths of the un-connected. Or at least that's what it felt like. You never realize quite how addicted you are to your internet connection until you lose it for a few days. As there's some sort of stupid 200-hour/month limit with our current dialup connection, we got cut off from the rest of the world on Thursday. But that was only the beginning of a very long weekend...
Thursday: As I mentioned before, we ran out of hours. I'm officially annoyed. I should not have to put up with such idiocy in ISP connection policies.
Friday: 20 minutes on my way home from work, and 40 minutes from home, the car broke down. For some wierd and uncanny reason two cylinders quit firing, and it's in the shop now being worked on. Just let me say that waiting around an hour in a hot car by the side of the freeway for my parents to come by and pick me up is not my idea of a good time.
Saturday: The guy from CNS was supposed to come out and hook us up. Hah. He never showed, and I'm still broadband-less. I'd be disappointed, but it's rather what I expected. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we can get him to show up at all this week.
Sunday: This was the icing on the cake. My baby brother almost got the tip of his finger cut off in a freak accident. He was playing with a little folding chair when he managed to fall on it and close his finger in the hinge. They had to take him into the ER, and he ended up with 6 stitches, 2 of which were internal, and enough pain medication to zonk him out for the rest of the week. It wasn't a pretty sight. Poor little kid; he's only 15 months old, and he doesn't quite understand why his hand has to be all wrapped up all the time.
And though today doesn't really fall into the weekend, I'm going to include it because I'm frustrated, and thus I'm going to do what I jolly well please.
Today: Since we finally got web access back today, I had to put a new NIC in the gateway last night so everthing would be up and running. Even though I wouldn't get to enjoy it until after I got home from work. All was well and good, but in the process, the DHCP process on the server had gotten totally screwed up. When it all finally started to catch up with the network, midway through the morning, I wasn't home, and my dad was left to try and troubleshoot it. In the process he yanked all the cables from all three hubs (Word to the wise: it'd be better to buy one 24-port switch than to slowly increase capacity by buying successive 8-port hubs), and then left it for me to work on when I got home. After driving home in a hot 15-passenger van, I was excited, to say the least.
I fixed the problem with the DHCP server in about 10 minutes, and then proceeded to hook up all the cables again. I could go into great detail about the joys of sifting through spaghetti with a flashlight under a desk in the corner, but I won't. Suffice to say that even the best among us would be capable of making a mistake or two. At any rate, I learned one new thing today: when you daisy-chain two hubs together, only do it with one cable. If by accident it happens in redundance, with one going from a regular port to a regular port and one going from an uplink port to a regular port, bad things happen. Not the least of which is the server being flooded with 2,000,000+ packets in a very short time. Needless to say, it decided enough was enough, and shut down the NIC driver. Of course, I didn't realize all this for another hour and a half, while I tried to figure out why absolutely nothing was working.
And if none of that made sense, count yourself amongst those blessed by happy oblivion. I'm just glad that a three-day weekend is coming up.
Posted by Ardith at July 1, 2003 10:26 PM