Why Bill Can't Get Things Done
Aug. 20th, 2022 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperI had great plans for this weekend to get a great many things done.
The universe seems to have had other plans.
It all started last night when the Internet proceeded to go wonky in our house. This happens periodically and my perception (perhaps inaccurate) of the SLA for the household is "Nothing must break. Ever." I may need to revise this perception, as when I growled at Julie when she asked when the Internet would be back up, she responded, "I was just asking."
But there was no connectivity from the second floor WAP (a TP-Link router configured to be a WAP, actually), which happens periodically. More concerning was that neither my home computer nor the work computer that are hardwired to the router downstairs had connectivity either. That's bad.
The WAP in the basement didn't seem to have connectivity as well, so it was starting to look like the right course of action was to reboot the modem. And that's what I did when I went to the basement. I verified that the computer there which is hardwired to the modem was working and headed back upstairs.
Where I found that nothing was working.
It was now time to make a big mistake. The Ethernet jack was a retrofit that we did nearly 20 years ago when we got a contractor to run conduit to the second floor from the router in the basement. I figured I'd just unplug the cable and plug it back in. It turns out that 20 years of settling and poking around behind the return of my desk had managed to cause the plug to shift. I was able to unplug it, but the jack was far enough off-centered in the hole that plugging it back in wasn't about to happen.
I didn't know at first that was the problem. I found that out later by tugging the very heavy return of the very heavy desk away from the wall so I could stick my phone down there and take a picture. It did not look at all good.
If I could find my stubby screwdriver, I could unscrew the plate and take a good look at it. The screwdriver was, of course, nowhere to be found. There are no other screwdrivers short enough to have a hope of fitting behind the return (the very heavy return) without figuring out how to pull it much farther away from the wall.
The score at this point: the Internet was available by hardwire in the basement and the Wi-fi provided by the cable modem was working, so there was at least some connectivity. It was time to give up and go to bed.
The next morning, I got up, sorted bath towels with Gretchen as we tried to decide what to keep in our bathroom, what to send to the back bathroom, what should go downstairs, and what should go to Goodwill. While considering this and the likelihood that I was going to have to go to Home Depot to buy a new Ethernet outlet jack and then punch in the wiring for the fool thing behind the return (the very heavy return), I remembered that the stubby screwdriver might be on the bookcase in the studio. I sent K to find it and she succeeded, which was the first really good thing that had happened in this particular adventure.
I stuck the end of the screwdriver into the jack and tried to convince it that being slightly better centered would be a good choice. Then I managed to click the Ethernet cable back into place. Unfortunately, this still left me with no connectivity upstairs.
I threw a load of shirts into the washer and the family went out to IHOP for lunch. When we got back, I turned on the Cubs vs. Brewers game, and a few minutes later, headed down to the basement to put the shirts in the dryer and go back to fighting with the Internet.
The modem looked to be ok. I still had connectivity on the hardwired computer there, but the external WAP wasn't working right. I managed to connect to the WAP from the hardwired computer and noticed that it was saying that the Internet connection wasn't there. Looking at the back of the WAP, I realized that the network wire was plugged into a network jack, not into the jack labeled "Internet". Well, that had always worked before, but who knows? Let's try it. I plugged the wire into the Internet jack, the WAP allowed that there was Internet, and my phone was able to connect to the WAP. A small victory!
As part of my messing around with the connections in the basement, I had tried plugging the cable going upstairs directly into a jack on the modem instead of routing it through the small switch in the basement. It hadn't helped. Cables had been rewired in all sorts of ways, finally landing back in the original configuration.
I went to check on the shirts, which were not quite done, but which would go into the wrinkle care tumble mode when done. Fine. They could wait. I would go upstairs to the office and try to sort this out.
Oh, look. The Cubs game is on the TV. I remember turning that on. And I sat down and ended up watching the Cubs beat the Brewers in extra innings, which was way more fun than fighting with the Internet.
And then it was time to go get the shirts, hang them up, and go fight with the Internet in the office.
At least I was able to use my phone to search the Internet for ideas by connecting to the basement WAP. And on one of those searches, I found someone who explained how their computer dock that was connected to a switch had bollixed up *all* of the traffic through the switch until it was unplugged and plugged back in.
I unplugged the dock from the work laptop. I plugged it back in. I now had Internet on both the work laptop and the home desktop. And there was much rejoicing.
Gretchen went out for a drive with Julie while I tried to revive the WAP upstairs. Since moving the connection from the network jack to the labeled Internet jack had worked in the basement, I figured I'd try that here. This turned out to be another mistake. I spent a bit over an hour rebooting, resetting to factory configuration, and reconfiguring the WAP only to be completely unable to get it out of router mode successfully. Happily, I was able to grab the network wire from my computer so I could make a direct connection with the WAP/router or this would have been nigh unto impossible.
I even loaded fresh firmware onto the WAP/router. It did not help.
I finally realized after searching the Internet in vain that *this* variation of WAP/router positively would *not* let you reconfigure it as a WAP if you plugged the network wire into the Internet jack. It *must* go into a network jack.
And now everything is working again.
For a while.
I will try to get some more non-Internet-related things done tomorrow.
The universe seems to have had other plans.
It all started last night when the Internet proceeded to go wonky in our house. This happens periodically and my perception (perhaps inaccurate) of the SLA for the household is "Nothing must break. Ever." I may need to revise this perception, as when I growled at Julie when she asked when the Internet would be back up, she responded, "I was just asking."
But there was no connectivity from the second floor WAP (a TP-Link router configured to be a WAP, actually), which happens periodically. More concerning was that neither my home computer nor the work computer that are hardwired to the router downstairs had connectivity either. That's bad.
The WAP in the basement didn't seem to have connectivity as well, so it was starting to look like the right course of action was to reboot the modem. And that's what I did when I went to the basement. I verified that the computer there which is hardwired to the modem was working and headed back upstairs.
Where I found that nothing was working.
It was now time to make a big mistake. The Ethernet jack was a retrofit that we did nearly 20 years ago when we got a contractor to run conduit to the second floor from the router in the basement. I figured I'd just unplug the cable and plug it back in. It turns out that 20 years of settling and poking around behind the return of my desk had managed to cause the plug to shift. I was able to unplug it, but the jack was far enough off-centered in the hole that plugging it back in wasn't about to happen.
I didn't know at first that was the problem. I found that out later by tugging the very heavy return of the very heavy desk away from the wall so I could stick my phone down there and take a picture. It did not look at all good.
If I could find my stubby screwdriver, I could unscrew the plate and take a good look at it. The screwdriver was, of course, nowhere to be found. There are no other screwdrivers short enough to have a hope of fitting behind the return (the very heavy return) without figuring out how to pull it much farther away from the wall.
The score at this point: the Internet was available by hardwire in the basement and the Wi-fi provided by the cable modem was working, so there was at least some connectivity. It was time to give up and go to bed.
The next morning, I got up, sorted bath towels with Gretchen as we tried to decide what to keep in our bathroom, what to send to the back bathroom, what should go downstairs, and what should go to Goodwill. While considering this and the likelihood that I was going to have to go to Home Depot to buy a new Ethernet outlet jack and then punch in the wiring for the fool thing behind the return (the very heavy return), I remembered that the stubby screwdriver might be on the bookcase in the studio. I sent K to find it and she succeeded, which was the first really good thing that had happened in this particular adventure.
I stuck the end of the screwdriver into the jack and tried to convince it that being slightly better centered would be a good choice. Then I managed to click the Ethernet cable back into place. Unfortunately, this still left me with no connectivity upstairs.
I threw a load of shirts into the washer and the family went out to IHOP for lunch. When we got back, I turned on the Cubs vs. Brewers game, and a few minutes later, headed down to the basement to put the shirts in the dryer and go back to fighting with the Internet.
The modem looked to be ok. I still had connectivity on the hardwired computer there, but the external WAP wasn't working right. I managed to connect to the WAP from the hardwired computer and noticed that it was saying that the Internet connection wasn't there. Looking at the back of the WAP, I realized that the network wire was plugged into a network jack, not into the jack labeled "Internet". Well, that had always worked before, but who knows? Let's try it. I plugged the wire into the Internet jack, the WAP allowed that there was Internet, and my phone was able to connect to the WAP. A small victory!
As part of my messing around with the connections in the basement, I had tried plugging the cable going upstairs directly into a jack on the modem instead of routing it through the small switch in the basement. It hadn't helped. Cables had been rewired in all sorts of ways, finally landing back in the original configuration.
I went to check on the shirts, which were not quite done, but which would go into the wrinkle care tumble mode when done. Fine. They could wait. I would go upstairs to the office and try to sort this out.
Oh, look. The Cubs game is on the TV. I remember turning that on. And I sat down and ended up watching the Cubs beat the Brewers in extra innings, which was way more fun than fighting with the Internet.
And then it was time to go get the shirts, hang them up, and go fight with the Internet in the office.
At least I was able to use my phone to search the Internet for ideas by connecting to the basement WAP. And on one of those searches, I found someone who explained how their computer dock that was connected to a switch had bollixed up *all* of the traffic through the switch until it was unplugged and plugged back in.
I unplugged the dock from the work laptop. I plugged it back in. I now had Internet on both the work laptop and the home desktop. And there was much rejoicing.
Gretchen went out for a drive with Julie while I tried to revive the WAP upstairs. Since moving the connection from the network jack to the labeled Internet jack had worked in the basement, I figured I'd try that here. This turned out to be another mistake. I spent a bit over an hour rebooting, resetting to factory configuration, and reconfiguring the WAP only to be completely unable to get it out of router mode successfully. Happily, I was able to grab the network wire from my computer so I could make a direct connection with the WAP/router or this would have been nigh unto impossible.
I even loaded fresh firmware onto the WAP/router. It did not help.
I finally realized after searching the Internet in vain that *this* variation of WAP/router positively would *not* let you reconfigure it as a WAP if you plugged the network wire into the Internet jack. It *must* go into a network jack.
And now everything is working again.
For a while.
I will try to get some more non-Internet-related things done tomorrow.