DHCP gone bad

Once upon a time we bought a Linksys router and configured it to hand out IP addresses dynamically. I forget why, but we specified a range of 100-150 for the final byte. (The router itself is 1. Practically speaking we'd never need as many as 50. These might have been defaults; I don't remember.) What this is supposed to mean is that it hands out addresses in order as needed, starting with 100, and if you ever have more than 50 machines on the network you have a problem.

This chugged along fine for a while until it started handing out out-of-range numbers. (No, we have never had so many machines that we exhausted the set range.) We couldn't stop it from giving my machine 192.168.1.2; when it did that my machine couldn't see the internet (presumably because this was out of range). We assigned fixed addresses (in range) to all the resident machines and carried on. I forgot about this until we switched DSL providers recently and found that my network settings were still referring to the old provider. (Once you specify IP address, you also end up specifying DNS servers.) Ok, back to DHCP. We replaced the router a year or two ago, so for all I knew this wasn't even an issue any more.

This morning I couldn't connect to the internet (after a reboot). After the usual diagnostics and quick fixes, I got around to looking at ipconfig. My IP address was, once again, 192.168.1.2. WTF? So this time I decided to change the router; I told it to start handing out addresses with 2 instead of with 100. That didn't fix it. So, finally, I assigned my machine a specific IP address, just like we did before, and it worked.

I still have no idea why this happens. I have a workaround, but the mystery still bugs me.

parsha bit: Pesach

Rabbi Sheshet said in the name of Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah: he who despises the festivals (by working on them and not celebrating) is like one who worships idols. This is because the command to have no molten gods is immediately followed by the command to keep the festival of unleavened bread. (Pesachim 118a)

some Toronto bits

I'll write more about the visit (and particularly the seders) later, but in the meantime...

Overheard: in-laws are like the weather; everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it. :-)

We stayed with my sister-in-law and her family. They have a computer in the family room that has come down with a bad case of trojan horses, so we tried to fix it for them. We couldn't, but we gave one of their daughters (always invoke the kid for computer problems :-) ) some specific research advice. However, it appears that this computer is a low priority for everyone. I will not be surprised if it's still afflicted on our next visit. (SIL's husband has his own computer and refuses to use a Windows machine; SIL reads email every few weeks; daughters are in school and use this one infrequently. The problems can only get worse; because it's not a high priority they aren't paying for anti-virus updates. Fortunately, this computer is turned off when not in use.)

When crossing the border into the US, we handed over our passports and the guard proceeded to ask several not-very-interesting-sounding questions. Dani noticed (I did not) that she swiped the passports immediately; I wonder if the questions were just to fill time until the "not on our terrorist lists" report came back.

Exchange rate: $1.00 US = $1.07 CDN. Whoa, when did that happen? I haven't been paying attention, but I thought it would be more like $1.30 CDN.

A five-pack of Toronto subway tokens costs less than four individually. So you can afford to buy five and throw one away, but of course you don't because that's wasteful, but what are the odds that we're going to have that token with us next time we would care? I think it's in the change pile now.

The ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) has some nifty stuff in its collection, but I don't know if I'll return. There were two things I found problematic, one general and one specific to me. The specific one is that in many exhibits, they put the little cards that tell you what you're looking at behind (and not close enough to) the glass, meaning I couldn't read them. I don't know why they do that. I might write and suggest that they make printed copies available for those with vision problems. (Yes, I could see the exhibits just fine; it was the darn cards that were problematic.)

The more general problem is that a lot of their write-ups are really, really sparse. Yeah, I'm kind of a research wonk, but I think most people want to know more than they're telling about many items. One example: there was a display of Japanese ceramics; all but one of the pots/dishes/vases had delicate floral designs. There was a lone pot with red stripes. I naturally wondered what was special about that one. Different region, time period, or technique? The entirety of the description was "red striped pot". Um, yeah, I got that on my own. :-)