Tuesday

Aug 28, 2001

cable hell

I stayed up too late on Portland time and battling the network configuration with my gateway dead. I'm the dead one this morning. I finally get going.

Altex is this real nerdy store. The guy checks my power supply and says it's dead. "New ones on aisle nineteen, a 250 will do, but get a 300." I buy one, not confident and buy one of those DSL routers everyone is raving about. And some more honking surge surpressors.

I go home and shift things around and take the old power supply out and put the new one in, not confident. It boots, though. I manage to put it on the network and direct-connect my work computer to it to get an internal address assigned and get a VPN hookup. I work some and fret some more about how to set the whole thing up again so that I'm not hanging on the Internet as a set of raw, unprotected IP addresses. It feels so naked.

I don't want to interrupt FFP's work day so I wait until he is done and SuRu comes over and provides moral support for cable hell. I can't get the DSL router to get out of DIAG mode. The troubleshooting is less than helpful. Something about flash the firmware and then call technical support. I give up and set it up with the LINUX machine running as the gateway. Which, of course, it's done well enough except when I let it take a spike. Of course, all the machines have to be reconfigured and I have to figure out what cable goes where. SuRu encourages labeling and somehow making it neater. We don't get far in that. Now, of course, that it is running, you hate to take anything down.

Pizza and beer and cables have made me tired. But somewhere in there, I've managed to kind of enjoy my day off. And, it rained again. We get rain now. I just had to go to Portland and get it.

a warm corner of cable hell