12.29.04
Sometimes Things Work
Things have happened around here, as you may have noticed.
First of all, I took the old blog down. That means I’m on my third blog now, with no archives to show for it. I took the old one down because of a job change—I didn’t really want my archives to be searchable. It’s not that I’d said anything particularly inappropriate (though a few of you knuckleheads made some memorable comments), but under the circumstances I thought a fresh start would be appropriate. I was careful, however, to save my archives so that I could restore entries selectively if I so chose. Then I started thinking about what my new blog should be about. The leading candidate, for a while there, was technology in education (and vice versa).
Then my laptop’s hard drive crashed. No big deal; it was still under warranty and the techs at the Apple Store were quite helpful. I got a new hard drive and a 200-gigabyte external monstrosity for backup and auxiliary file storage.
Another thing that happened around this time is that my cable modem got really flaky. It had been having some problems for a while, but they were getting worse. It would lose its connection several times a day, and usually the only way to fix it was to reach around back and touch the metal part where the cable screwed into the modem. As soon as I touched that part it would reset and (usually) find its connection (sometimes it took a few tries, and sometimes I had to turn it on its side, or upside-down, before it worked again). This was annoying, but since Comcast had it in their records that I owned my own modem (which technically I did not, but that’s another story), I didn’t want to call and have them fix it and lose my $5/month savings. Because I’m a cheap bastard. Oh—also, my wireless router stopped working in wireless mode.
Then my server crashed. This had happened before—indeed, browsing my old host’s user forum indicated that it’s pretty common there. It seems to be a hardware problem, but no one had pinned down the cause last time I checked. My server crashed maybe once or twice a month on average; some users had much worse problems. But this time it went down and didn’t come back up. The techs said it looked like a bad kernel, so they installed a new one. That crashed. They removed the hard drive and installed a fresh installation (of the wrong OS). That crashed, too, and before I’d had a chance to install a single piece of software. Also, the backup they’d made of my files didn’t work.
Anyway, this is where things start turning around for me.
I got a new host: Tek Alchemy. From what I’ve seen from them so far, I like them a lot. They put a Gentoo LiveCD in the server and let me do the setup myself, and when I needed help (because I’d rebooted my server without setting SSH to start at the default runlevel) they fixed it within ten minutes. They’re the same price as EV1, but offer Gentoo and apparently more reliable hardware. So that’s good.
Then I bought a new cable modem/wireless router combo unit. I was tired of Linksys (ubiquitous, but I’ve never really cared for them), and had planned on getting a Netgear, but ended up getting a Motorola SBG900. Today, since I was home sick (oh yeah—I’ve been sick), I braced myself for a full day of frustration and searched the Comcast site for a phone number to call so I could argue with someone about MAC addresses. I found no phone number on the site. No kidding. Instead, I ended up chatting with someone who gave me the following instructions:
- Install the new cable modem in place of the old one.
- Restart the computer.
- Go to https://sas.r2.attbi.com.
- Enter your account number and registration code (the registration code is usually the last nine digits of the account number).
- Select the old cable modem from the drop-down list and click “Replace.”
- Enter a name for the new cable modem and click “Replace.”
- Click the link to “Reset Cable Modem.”
And it worked! The process took about five minutes. The only part he didn’t mention is that if your cable modem includes a built-in router, as mine does, you’ll need to do the select-replace-name-replace thing twice, because your modem has two MAC addresses: one for the modem and one for the router. He did, however, give me a tech support number: (888) 266-2278.
The Motorola, by the way, is nice. Lots of twiddly settings to play with (way more than in the old Linksys), and a more logical layout to me (I could never remember which security settings Linksys deemed “advanced”).
So, in summary:
- Apple support: Good.
- EV1 Servers: Bad.
- Linksys: Meh.
- Tek Alchemy: Good.
- Comcast: Good.
- Motorola: Good.
And now it’s a new year.
As for the future this blog—well, hell, when have I ever managed to stick with one interest? Expect the usual blather.
