Having a new route(r) without kids

"Reporting from the Internet!" Sinjin here!

Reporting from the drop, the place at the end of the fiber-optic cable where the rubber (or whatever) meets the road (or internet highway).

I made Tucker let me blog because he's jumped me a few times and knocked me on my back and made me screech.

The Big Guy says Tucker doesn't feel so good lately because he took T-Bob off Prednisone. Does he ever get crabby! (Tucker, that is.)

But Tucker said for me to go ahead and blog, he doesn't care. (::sulk sulk::) So I am.

A few days ago the internet stopped working. Big Guy thought he hadn't paid the bill, so he hurried up and called them and paid it over the phone. (Thank dog the phones haven't been shut off!)

But that wasn't it. So he used his rusted-out skills as a former networks taker-​care-​of-​person and figured out that our router was kinda broken.

The power supply fell apart before I came here. But somedoggy (♮ ​♩ ​♫  ​T, U, C ... See you real soon!  K, E, R ....  ♬) musta stepped on it or rolled on it or somehow broke a wire.

(The wi-fi antenna was also chewed up, but it still worked.)

Busted wire, pathetic antenna.

See‽‽‽

Now if one of his kids had been here, they coulda just soldered the wire back on! They're studying electronics for their job, and soldering is one of their classes right now.

Well, the Big Guy took the dead router outta there and tried to go straight from the cable modem to the computer. Nothin'. Rebooted the computer. More nothin'.

Not nothin' exactly, but not internet either. Iceweasel (which is Debian's version of Firefox ... it's a long story) kept saying it couldn't find any of the servers for the websites we wanted to see.

So B.G. grumbled and mumbled and went and bought a new router. It's behind me in that first picture up there, still in its box.

When he got home, he talked to his other kid (who was just a computer taker-​care-​of-​person and is now a computer-​and-​networks taker-​care-​of-​person), who told him all he needed to do was reboot the cable modem.

DOH!

Well ha, ha. It still didn't work. So he rebooted the computer again and now everything worked. Without the new router, even.

mr_ed:  A free tip on how to be your own computer-​and/or-​networks taker-​care-​of-​person, retail value in the hundreds of dollars:

Turn the power off;
Wait 10 seconds;
Turn the power on.

By non-actual count, this makes 85% of all computer-​and/or-​network problems go away. It's the first and most valuable lesson in all online and correspondence courses for becoming computer-​and/or-​networks taker-​care-​of-​people.

The fancy new router is still sitting in its unopened plastic-wrapped box. B.G. thinks maybe the next time the second kid comes over, he'll twist an arm or two and get a free installation.

We'll see!

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