{"id":798,"date":"2009-07-07T23:15:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T22:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/?p=798"},"modified":"2009-07-08T17:51:49","modified_gmt":"2009-07-08T16:51:49","slug":"thunder-and-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/2009\/07\/07\/thunder-and-router\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder and router"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"di090707\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Old router brought back after years in a dusty plastic bag. <\/em><\/p>\n

Last night as I was about to go to bed, very sleepy, I thought I heard far-off thunder. \u00c2\u00a0I turned off all the computers and the network (router and ADSL modem) and disconnected them from the mains. \u00c2\u00a0I did not however unplug the phone cables. \u00c2\u00a0Perhaps I should have, but probably it would have made no difference.<\/p>\n

When I woke up, it had rained but was already clearing up. \u00c2\u00a0The air stayed cooler both indoors and outdoors for all of the day. \u00c2\u00a0But I could not connect to the Internet. \u00c2\u00a0I decided to give it time and went to work. It has happened before during thunderstorm season that the ISP’s node has been out of commission for a few hours. \u00c2\u00a0But when I returned, I still could not get online.<\/p>\n

Still, there was something strange going on. \u00c2\u00a0My Winamp Remote icon in the Windows tray showed that I was connected, although I had been unable to connect to it from work. \u00c2\u00a0(I often play music at work from my hard disk at home, now that I have transferred all my CDs to hard disk.) When I tried to load a page, it started, seemed to load a tiny bit of it, but then gave up. \u00c2\u00a0And when I ran network diagnosis on the Vista machine, it said I was connected to the Internet after I fiddled a bit with the cables. \u00c2\u00a0(I am not sure that was actually necessary.) \u00c2\u00a0I even got City of Heroes running on that machine. It took some tries to get connected, but once it hooked up, the speed was just fine. \u00c2\u00a0Still, I could not load web pages on any of my computers, nor connect the LiveJournal client or Opera Unite. \u00c2\u00a0Something was amiss.<\/p>\n

I unplugged the WAN cable from the home network router and plugged it straight in my main PC. \u00c2\u00a0It warned me that there might be limited or no connection, but moments later I could connect to everything at the speed I have purchased and then some. Of course the other machines were now disconnected from the Net. \u00c2\u00a0The main problem with this was that I could not dualbox in City of Heroes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lately, after \u00c2\u00a0days of a strict Sims 3<\/em> gaming diet, I have returned to City of Heroes<\/em>. My imaginary girlfriend, who for good measure roleplays my imaginary wife in that particular game, has several characters around level 30 on Virtue, the unofficial official roleplaying server. \u00c2\u00a0(There are no official roleplaying servers, but the players have decided on this one for roleplaying.) Anyway, level 30 is a good time to start on the zone Brickstown, which has a nice mix of smaller and larger groups of villains shortly after you leave the train station. Well, the short of it is that my imaginary female companion has mostly support characters, defenders and controllers, which are not all that good at playing alone. \u00c2\u00a0Sometimes she gets a spot on some random team, but if not I will log on one of my official characters and help her out. I have a number of tankers and scrappers on Virtue, which go well with her defenders and controllers respectively. \u00c2\u00a0(By “her” I am referring to an imaginary player, but the dynamic would be the same with real players.)<\/p>\n

Because of all this I really wanted to have at least two computers online, but I could only get one to work. \u00c2\u00a0On the other hand, when the router was connected, I could call up shared files on another local computer in the blink of an eye. \u00c2\u00a0Clearly both the router and the ADSL modem worked, but somehow it seemed that they hated each other’s guts. \u00c2\u00a0I could even connect to the modem through the router from my PC, so clearly the connection was there. But the router did not want to route data to and from the Internet.<\/p>\n

I am not sure the thunder was part of this at all, truth to tell. The surge would have needed to go through the modem without hurting it, then hitting the router, yet doing so little damage that it could do anything else than load web pages. \u00c2\u00a0Suspicious. \u00c2\u00a0If we exclude malicious intent, the most likely cause is probably overheating. \u00c2\u00a0The Jensen router is very compact and gets hot even in winter. In summer it is disturbingly hot to the touch and could really have needed some cooling. \u00c2\u00a0It may be too late now, however.<\/p>\n

Around bedtime I decided to fetch the old router, which I had stopped using sometime before I moved here. \u00c2\u00a0The problem was that its wireless network was very weak and had a ridiculously small radius, something like the size of my previous living room. \u00c2\u00a0I did not get a good connection from my bedroom. There may have been other issues too, but if so I have forgotten them. \u00c2\u00a0One nice thing about it is, it is much less hot. \u00c2\u00a0I unplugged the old and plugged everything into the even older, which had spent the last several years in a dusty plastic bag in my cupboard. It did not work. \u00c2\u00a0I was not too surprised. \u00c2\u00a0I had a new ISP since then, probably two. \u00c2\u00a0I found the user manual (which was on a CD) and managed to log into the router. Here I changed the setup from PPPOE to Dynamic something, and within a minute the computers were connected! \u00c2\u00a0Good as new!<\/p>\n

Happy ending, except that I was now extremely sleepy again and also felt a little sick. I went to bed, the computers happily chatting with the Internet.<\/p>\n

To be continued?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old router brought back after years in a dusty plastic bag. Last night as I was about to go to bed, very sleepy, I thought I heard far-off thunder. \u00c2\u00a0I turned off all the computers and the network (router and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,45,70,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-games","category-internet","category-slice-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions\/801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}