The internet done died again. Has been happening on and off the past couple days at the new place, which I had been attributing to crappy cablemodem service. One of the downstairs people was idly suspecting a conflict between our various routing and switching boxen, so we played with the settings a bit, restarted everything, it seemed to all work, and everyone went their merry ways… until it died again this evening. Heretofore they’d been going down and resetting the routery bits everytime (modem, little black ghetto router [theirs], little blue Linksys AP [ours]), but it seems that today, the Downstairs People came up with a different repair procedure, which involved ripping out all our equipment and throwing it on the floor. After the most recent outage, I came down to the basement to find this and hear Downstairs People stomping around in an agitated manner. (And upon hearing me come down to examine the cause of the most recent outage, something to the effect of “…I hear ’em! They’re going down there again to FUCK WITH IT, I can hear ’em down there.”) So yeah, big showdown between Upstairs People (or myself and Er*, anyway) and Downstairs People, the the downstairs’ router-ripper and resident hothead acting as self-declared network expert.
Sparky McHothead: “…anyway, so (pointing to 10meg hub I threw in to run Ethereal on the wired segment and see what was happening) your hub’s IP address is probably conflicting with our router…”
Me: “It’s a hub, it doesn’t have an IP address.”
Sparky McHothead: “Er..MAC address, I mean…”
Me: (just slaps forehead and braces for a looong night…)
Eventually got nowhere with hothead guy, who is presumably the name behind the cablemodem (which we were all going to be sharing, as part of the original move-in agreement), so I ended up turning my computer this way and that until I could pick up an unsecured wireless network from a neighbor’s house, hop onto it and NAT the entire upstairs-house through it. Yay, 10k/s and at least 2 address translations between us and the real world. Something tells me I’ve got a long dark future of tech support ahead for a while…
Heh, it also turns out that
1) So*, one of my new roommates here, grew up about 20 minutes from me in the ‘burbs of Chicago. Cool.
2) Er*, heading the whole roomie-replacement shindig at ### Princeton, also had ‘the crazy lady’ (recognized immediately by description during my account of harrowing house-showing week, trying to give bus directions over bad cellphone connections to people who could barely speak English, etc.) show up to check out this new place. Mostly seeming generally creepy-crawly, and picking at little nicks/marks/blemishes on walls and doorjambs going “…ooh…..this is damaged, yeah…” (wierd, because given the exterior and the generally-falling-apart of the place, I wouldn’t have expected her to even come inside given the response to my old place).
QOTD: (my office, during a valiant effort to reinflate a basketball without the proper tools)
JP: “We’re a bunch of fucking MacGuyvers over here.”
DG: “Yeah, not just MacGuyvers, but uh, MacGuyvers having sex.”
TG: “That’s some imagery I just didn’t need.”
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