The woes of the net

So, I come home from a week's vacation, the first thing I notice: the cable modem is dead.

Great. Call support. Surprisingly, I get a technician within less than a minute. Unsurprisingly, he tells me to come and get a new modem. Just what I expected, these things never last more than two years...

Summer of course is the time where there is work done EVERYWHERE. The result are terrible traffic jams. I have no idea how long exactly I sat in my car, but it was very long. To make matters worse, I'm still far too used to the automatic gears, and the manual ones on my own car freaked me out. The motor died many times.

More waiting in their support center. A single technician, ten people to change their modems. Damn mondays.

Drive home went rather well. Stuff in modem. Connect. Go to the shop to buy food. They told me it should work in about an hour. Come home, reboot server. No working. Carry monitor and keyboard to server. Connect. Oh, did I mention we had workers in our home while we were away? Furniture is still standing everywhere, just not where it belongs, and everything is covered in a thin dust layer. They made the finishing touches today, so I had to climb around them sometimes.
Anyway, check computer. Tells me it fails to set the gateway. Try pinging gateway. Doesn't work. Update config files (forgot to do that after the last big update). Reboot. Doesn't work. Get angry.
As usual, it's my own fault. I look at Gentoo's init script for the net to find out how that network thing works. Notice that starting dhcpcd is the only real work. Do it manually, internet works. Why not with the script?

The gateway was incorrectly configured. Or rather, it shouldn't have been configured at all, but it was. Well, removed that part, internet now works.

Step two, internal network doesn't work. I blame Microsoft. Rebooting WinXP computer about five times doesn't help. Besides, the Linux box doesn't work either.

Eh? Check dhcp server. Runs nicely, but never even gets a request.
Then the idea. Of course a software maniac like me takes forever to check the CABLES! Turns out one of the switches had no power. Duh!

So, net is back up, my room is actually inhabitable again and I'm going through more than 500 emails. Lucky I can scrap most of them. They're not even spam. Just mailing list traffic.

Well, until the next time
CornedBee