Playing and Losing Network Roulette

For work reasons the home network was switched to a static IP. Obviously this had to involve shit not working.

First the Mac upstairs couldn't connect. We managed to fix that. Then my mom's new work laptop didn't work. Obviously a major problem, but we fixed it. So just to complete it, my computer stopped connecting.

Normally I'd have had "restart modem/router" at number 3 or 4 on my list, with "plugged in/turned on", "repair connection", and "restart computer" as possible winners. But when everything is taking turns not working and the most important things work, those being the two work laptops, the last thing you want to do is tempt fate by touching the router.

Not that I could have, given that it was no longer at the default address. Well, I eventually did, after what I'll call an hour of wasting time on pointless shit. So finally I managed to figure out where the router claimed to be and connected to it. Then I wasted more time trying to get anything done using the UI. You'd think "reset DHCP leases" or something equivalent would be easy to find, perhaps on the LAN -> DHCP page, but no. Add in more time as I finally...

One sec, I forgot to mention my adventures with manually setting an IP address for my computer. If it won't give me one, then I will take one! Simple enough. I can see that that one is 202 and that one is 204 and that one is 203, so 205 or 206 should be available, right? Okay, my iPod apparently took 205, because it thinks it is just that important to steal one of the only five available slots. But 206, bam, got it, refresh the page and firefox is oh my god loading google! WOOOO! I don't recall exactly what button I pressed, but next thing I knew, it was all lost. And to make it worse, it now claimed 206 was in use.

Skipping ahead, I finally found the unsearchable (firefox find didn't work) manual for the router software which eventually led me to the command line. Ah yes, command lines. The place where you can get shit done. If you know how. But now I did! Thankfully the Mac has built-in telnet (in Terminal) so I could connect to the router, log in as admin, and enter that glorious command: reset dhcp server.

And glorious working internet was mine again.

So now between two laptops, the Mac, and my computer, we have one single spare address. I'm not even sure I can change that. This seems stupid. I'm not quite sure who to blame, since my usual scapegoats don't really seem applicable. I mean, how can this possibly be the fault of Obama, Bush, Wall Street, Austria, Stalin, Tigole, Ghostcrawler, casuals, noobs, hardcore losers, kids these days, old people, Protestants, Catholics, heathens, Reagan, or God?

So guess what? No fun post for tomorrow. But here's a sneak preview of what I might write one of these days if I get around to it: so far, Homefront is a really crappy game. It's like Call of Duty except somehow fails to ever feel like much fun. And after wasting time fixing the new game crashing problem, it found a new random place to crash, with a new error to go with it. But I plan to finish it, if only so I can know for certain that it is entirely not worth playing.