Entries tagged with home-internet

Entry tags:

home-internet

dammit Verizon...

After some heavy storms this afternoon (complete with flash-flood warnings), we came home to a power outage. The power came on around 7, but we had no Internet service. We have FiOS, so I checked the phone (dial tone) and TV (receiving channels I don't get over the air), so it wasn't a general outage. We restarted the router a couple times, but that didn't help.

Dani called for support, worked through an automated menu, and eventually requested a call back. We made and ate dinner -- no call. I tried Google, which took me to Verizon's troubleshooting pages. One painstaking step at a time I told it that the problem was Internet, I was using a wired connection, yes the wire was plugged in (I assume the Wifi path would have had me verify the password), yes I'd restarted the router... and then told me I needed a technician. Gee thanks; I'd figured that much out on my own. Other pages told me that I might need to reset something in the "ONT" (the box in the basement), and I found an anecdote that said Verizon had talked the blogger through the process just fine and it was easy and saved him a service call, but didn't say what to do. (Who were you, DenverCoder9???) We opened the side of the box labelled "customer access" that nonetheless required a screwdriver, saw that the "data" light was off, and saw no obvious way to proceed.

I called and worked through an automated system full of "duh" and a test from their end saying the problem is in my house (yeah, that seemed pretty likely), and eventually I got into a queue for a human. And waited. And waited. Occasionally the recording interrupted the hold music to tell me that I could go through the same troubleshooting by using their software, which I could download from... , missing the irony that we didn't have an Internet connection. (Ok, there's probably a phone app that I could get from the Play Store, but that's not where they were directing me.)

43 minutes later "Steve in Texas" picked up. For my own future reference and perhaps your information, he had me:

Turn off the router.
Disconnect the coax cable. (He asked where the cable went and when I said "into the wall" he said "good, that'll be easier".)
Reconnect the coax cable.
Turn the router on.

And that fixed it. Is that so much harder than telling people to verify that an Ethernet cable is plugged in? Would it have been so hard to put that information on their support page? Are they worried that people can't disconnect and reconnect a coax cable without damaging something, so they don't want just anybody trying that? (Well if so, let me just clarify that I offer no warranties on this blog post.)

I asked Steve why that works, and he said that sometimes the router gets "out of sync" after a power outage and fully disconnecting it from the data feed resets it. Good to know.

Entry tags:

random bits

FiOS has finally come to my neighborhood, years after many others in the city. The installer is here now. It sounds like a big production; I hope there aren't too many surprises. One surprise already: my "HD" TV package won't actually deliver HD signal unless I pay to rent a fancier box. This was not disclosed. The guy I called about it today offered me three months of movie channels but I'd have to remember to call and cancel that or they'll start charging me; not interested in that. I only got the bundle with TV because (for the next two years) it's cheaper than just getting phone and internet, so in that sense it hasn't particularly harmed me, but it still leaves a bad taste.

If you've been caught up in the "AOL/Yahoo email addresses not playing well with mailing lists" problem, or if you haven't but you've heard something about it, you might want to read this summary of the problem from

siderea. I guess some people assumed that mailing lists don't matter any more and everybody does web fora, or something.

Last week was Shavuot. There's a tradition of staying up all night studying torah; we have a community-wide study that runs for three hours (from 10PM to 1AM) and then several local synagogues take it from there, for those who want. The community one has 6-8 classes in each 50-minute slot, so there are choices. There seems to be a tradition of giving them not-very-informative names; I went to one called "speed torah" just to find out what it meant, and it turned out the rabbi leading it had prepared several very short texts to look at in small study groups (ideally pairs, but people seemed to want to do trios), moving groups every 3-4 minutes and moving on to the next text. So "speed torah" in the "speed dating" sense, but without the scorecards to keep track of who you'd like to meet again. Cute. There was also one on social media, which the rabbi had expected to be populated primarily by teenagers. He did get some teens, but mostly us older folks. He did a credible job of adjusting his plans on the fly.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. It's a good group of people; I'm looking forward to getting past the administrivia and initial-learning phases and doing work that really contributes. My manager (who's not local) spent a day with me here, during which he observed that I needed a better monitor or two (because of vision) and no of course he understands about things like Shabbat and Jewish holidays. (Pro tip: if you observe Shabbat, try to never start a job in Standard Time -- let them see that you're good before you start disappearing early on Fridays. But we were talking about Shavuot and why I needed to take a day off so soon after starting.) This week I got email from him: the 24" monitor I wanted (key features: 16:10 aspect ratio, can rotate) wasn't available, so would I accept the same monitor in 30"? Yeah, that should work... (Getting one now, and after checking it out we'll decide what to do about the second one.)

I recently read the first two of Rick Cook's "Wiz" books (Wizard's Bane and Wizardry Compiled). They're great fun, even if they feel a little like geek-flavored "Mary Sue". A programmer from our world is whisked away into a world that has magic -- for reasons unknown, and the guy who summoned him is now dead. While there he figures out that magic spells can be implemented in a way akin to programming; he doesn't understand magic, but he understands programming. So... The books have some nods to programmers that others might not pick up on, but they don't seem like they'd get in the way for those who aren't. They're quick reads, and I was looking forward to continuing on with the third one, until... brick wall! Baen published the first two as ebooks and has published the rest as ebooks but not currently, and they're not to be found in ebook format now as best I can tell. (If you know otherwise, please help.) I don't expect free (I happily paid for one of these); I do want to read them on my Kindle -- because yes I read paper books and ebooks, but I'm finicky about keeping sets together. (I don't even like mixing hardbacks and paperbacks in a series because it messes up the shelving.) There's not even an explanation on Baen's site; just "not currently available" where the "buy" button should be. Drat.

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thanks, Verizon

Naturally, network problems (of the "can't stay connected for more than a few minutes" variety) would arise on a long weekend. Verizon can have someone look at it on Tuesday, so long as I don't mind that it'll be during work hours.

I don't know if this is by design or if I'm doing something wrong, but I finally figured out why my Mac was happy to connect to my phone's WiFi hotspot but was unwilling to use it: it appears that a wired connection, even one that's not working, trumps wireless. Once I unplugged the ethernet cable I could see the internet again. I can't help feeling that something in the network-settings panel should have clued me in about that, instead of showing two green connections without comment. Oh well; now I know, and if it's relevant to anybody reading this, now you do too.

I wonder how quickly this will drain my phone's battery. I guess if I want to watch anything on the Roku I should plug the phone in first.

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but those were useful features!

A very helpful (yes, really!) technician at Verizon diagnosed our network problems as a flaky router, so he sent us a new one and we swapped it in today. The old router had two features that I found useful: I could name devices on the network, and the "my network" list showed me everything that had connected since the last router restart, not just the currently-connected devices. These, particularly in combination, were useful for monitoring my network. (Why yes, since I can be punished for anything done from my IP address even if I didn't do or authorize it, and since no security that is still usable is perfect, I do care.)

The new router lacks both of these features; it shows currently-connected devices by MAC address (and IP address), but short of my maintaining the name-MAC mappings externally, that's of limited utility. And it doesn't tell me if a neighbor found his way onto my network while I wasn't watching. Now my neighbors seem like decent folks, and in a different legal environment I'd rather be the sort of person who shares my spare bandwidth with anybody who needs it, but that's not the point.

Oh well. I guess I am now relying more strongly on decent neighbors and passwords, as I haven't found anything like router logs that tell me this stuff.

I know that some of my readers are pretty security-conscious. How do you handle this?

Entry tags:

home-internet

tap tap

Maybe today we have Internet access for more than 15 minutes at a time? Let's find out.

(If I haven't replied to something you expected me to, that's why. New modem should arrive tomorrow. Astonishingly and much to their credit, Verizon tech support was helpful and quite competent in troubleshooting this. It's possible that the secret is to go down the "Mac" tree instead of the "Windows" tree, though I've been doing that for a few years and this is the best I've experienced.)

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Verizon, surely you can do better than this

Dear Verizon,

Thank you for the phone message alerting me to the impending expiration of the credit card I have on file with you. Unfortunately, the URL you gave in the phone message does not exist, and when I searched your site for "pay" and "credit card" I did not find the page (that you assured me exists) where I could update this information. Your URL contained "pay online", so I had high hopes for "pay".

So then I tried your "contact us" link, which tried mightily to direct me to chat, forums, help, and all manner of unsatisfactory-to-me (but easy-for-you) destinations. (Let's hear it for crowd-sourced support, eh?) When I reached the "send email" option I found a form (not an email address) that, among things, asked for my name, phone number, and email address (twice). It also asked for an account number, but since you bill my credit card directly I've never seen a paper bill and have no idea what that number is -- so that "sample bill" image didn't help. Your form required that I type something there and wouldn't let me type letters, so my plan to signal this with "unknown" was foiled. It wouldn't accept "?" either.

So, I'm sorry that my "account number" of 0 will slow you down, but you left me no choice. I hope you can still manage to respond to me, as otherwise we'll have to wait for Visa to decline a payment to you. On the plus side, I'll bet that will get you to talk to me.

By the way, I'd be happy to refer you to web-site developers who could greatly improve the usability of your site for a small investment.

Oh, also, I'm still waiting for the opportunity to spend more money with you each month for FiOS. Surely my neighborhood full of geeks, university folks, and the like would make it profitable for you to run fiber over here. Practically everybody else in the east end seems to have it...

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weird DSL problem

We came home to no internet service tonight, but the failure mode is odd. We do have connectivity, but no DNS -- so that would be a well-understood problem, except that I can use ssh to get to my shell provide -- by name. I can also ping that host by name -- but I can't ping anything else by name. Does MacOS maintain some sort of cached state for ssh?

And when did browsers start rewriting IP addresses to domain names? I could visit my favorite web sites by IP address in principle, but when I type in an IP address the browser turns it into a domain name, tries to load that...and fails, because there's no DNS. WTF?

Verizon has been underwhelming so far, and I even mean compared to other Verizon experiences. At one point they said the line must be bad and they'd send a technician in a couple of days, then put us on hold for 10+ minutes. But how could it be a bad line if we have any connectivity at all? When the guy came back he said that there's an outage (previously he had said there wasn't), so with luck it'll come back on its own.

But if anybody reading this could tell me where to find some DNS servers that I'd be allowed to hit, I'd be grateful. I'm trying to find that on my own, but using the phone is slow going.

Entry tags:

home-internet

not fair!

Today a friend (less technical than I), who lives about three-quarters of a mile from me, asked me which is better for internet: Comcast or Verizon FiOS.

I've been waiting for FiOS to reach my street for years -- and, according to Verizon's "what's available at your address" page, I'm still waiting.

*Sigh*

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Verizon, round N

Dealing with Verizon has gotten less excruciating since I acquired the direct-dial number of someone in tier-3 tech support who seems to have a clue. We are definitely into the second-order problems now.

Muhammad (who I spoke with last week) did not approve of our modem, so he sent us a new combined modem/router (including wireless). It came today; if any paper it shipped with had included the modem's user name and password, I might not have needed to call for help in setting it up. The internet side of this is fine.

So far we have been unable to get the wireless to work with either Mac in the house (the only wireless devices we have). With WEP turned on, the password is simply not accepted. If we turn WEP off and go to MAC authentication instead, neither machine can see the network. If we turn off all security everything works fine, but we're not interested in doing that.

Right now our solution is to leave the wireless turned off unless we actively need it, but that's a short-term solution. To his credit, Muhammad said he would research this and call me back tomorrow. (I think he will; he also called earlier today to confirm the modem had arrived.) Muhammad isn't a Mac user (he called back to say "what OS?" and when I said "10.4" he asked if that was sufficient ID), so we'll see what happens. So far what Google is telling me is that other people with iBooks have had this problem.

Wireless is new to me (I've used other people's networks but never administered one). I thought it pretty much just worked out of the box these days, but I guess not.

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DSL followup

( finally connected )

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the joys of Verizon

Our DSL was supposed to switch from Nidhog to Verizon today. Nidhog was reselling Verizon, so that should be a no-brainer, but this is Verizon we're talking about. Almost everything they told me in advance turned out to be wrong (some things were probably outright lies). We have no connection at home and now they're jerking me around.

"Maddy" claimed that we would have uninterrupted service (aside from the momentary blip of the switch). We lost our connection overnight and the support person I spoke with this morning told me I should expect it to take until 6PM for them to connect us. That's a pretty loose definition of "uninterrupted" -- and that's assuming the claim is correct. By 6PM the business office is closed, so there's no one to escalate to.

The claim that I could create a temporary account and thereby get my router settings last night was, near as I can tell, utter fabrication, though it is possible that "Manu", his supervisor (whose name I couldn't parse through the accent), "Rauel" (this morning), and "Linda" (escalation this morning) were all wrong about that. All of these people told me, last night or today, that I would have to connect a single machine to the modem and setup would be automatic from there, and after that I could put the router back and it would work.

Err, what? Are they claiming that somehow, once I put my password-protected router back on the net, their software is going to reconfigure it? I don't think so. Everyone has been utterly unwilling to just tell me the configuration information I'll need (e.g. DNS servers). I predict that what they are actually going to do is configure a single machine and leave me to fend for myself from there (examine what they did to that machine, use the info to configure the router, and undo what they did to the machine).

"Linda" was supposed to escalate this and said someone would call me back on my cell phone "ASAP", but that hasn't happened yet. (That was at 9:30.) I guess I get to play support roulette tonight when I get home. (I'm posting this via email from work.)

One minor thing in my favor: if I have to connect a single machine to the modem anyway, it's going to be a Mac. I don't know Macs particularly well, but it seems less likely to get me routed to the undertrained, underinformed, English-limited support pool. (This morning I chose "Mac" on the phone tree and got to "Rauel", who seemed to actually know what he was doing -- but, unfortunately, he couldn't make them connect my service.)

If FiOS ever comes to my neighborhood I'll be thrilled. As soon as Verizon switches me over to it, I'm going to turn around and transfer my account to Nidhog (who now does FiOS but not DSL). Nidhog knows how to take care of customers!

Entry tags:

home-internet

DSL :-(

Damn. The last local ISP in Pittsburgh, which has provided us excellent service, is going away. (I hadn't realized it had gotten quite that bad.) Our choices are Verizon (DSL) and Comcast (cable), so I've just submitted the order with Verizon. This should be a simple transfer (our ISP was reselling Verizon), but they have no apparent process for simple transfers, so we'll see. (No, not going to do Comcast, and not interested in switching technologies until the day Verizon deigns to offer FiOS in our neighborhood.)

With Nidhog (current ISP), service has been excellent, I had the owner's cell-phone number, and the very few problems were dealt with quickly and easily (even the ones that weren't really theirs to fix). Verizon claims 24/7 support but they mean online chat, which has obvious limitations. Getting a phone number at all was harder than it should have been, and I don't yet know the hours when it's staffed. (Not at 10PM on a Saturday.)

Edit: This wasn't clear from the mail I got on Friday, but tonight I learned that Nidhog is not going away completely. They are just ceasing to offer DSL. (I'd love to know what happened there...) If FiOS were available to my address I could buy it from Nidhog (so when it is I will, should it ever be).

Entry tags:

random bits

Ok, you guys were right: Heroes rocks, at least so far. I picked up the first season recently; I was hooked after two episodes and have seen six so far. It looks like the second season will be released on DVD in August, which means I won't have too long a wait. Increasingly, I'm coming to think that this is the way to watch most TV shows. (I should also be able to return the first season of Lost to the person who lent it to me and exchange it for the second season soon.) Still, I want to get an antenna up on the roof too. (Note to self.)

We've been having some modem troubles (two modems with different failure modes), so we ordered another recently to experiment with. It looks like we have a family of modems -- maybe a breeding program. given the evidence, I'd have to say that Westel-ness is a dominant gene. :-)

My vet wanted to see Erik recently (just a quick check on something), so while we were there I asked if she could try again to teach me how to push pills into him. (Currently he gets his medicine ground up in canned food, as I seem unable to reliably get a whole pill down.) She demonstrated, then had me try... and she finally said "it's ok; mixing it into the food won't hurt him". I feel inadequate; even my vet gave up on me. :-) (Yes, I have tried that plunger-like gadget. I haven't found the cat treats that have pockets for hiding pills in, but I suspect he's too smart for that.)

A bakery run on the honor system seems not to be loosing money. Interesting idea. (Someone on my reading list posted this link, but I forget who.)

I have a question for the Hebrew-literate. Please humor me. How would you say "I will thank you" (masculine, singular)? I thought I knew, and then I heard a different formation in a song, so I asked a native speaker, who provided a third option. (I think "odecha", song was "odeka", speaker said "odelecha". It's entirely possible that "odecha" is biblical and "odelecha" is modern, but what's with "odeka"?)

Entry tags:

random bits

Recently (to investigate something), I added a third-party tracker to some of my posts in order to see where the hits are coming from. This was meant to be temporary, but I've found it interesting to see just how big the internet community is, so I've continued to use it at times. So, I don't know who any of y'all are (and publishing on the internet means I might never know, and that's cool), but I'd like to say hello to my regular readers in Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and Cambodia (!).

We are having weird modem luck. I thought all DSL modems were basically the same, but apparently not. Our old (bought in 1999) modem has started dropping signal -- it's eratic, but when it happens it lasts for a few hours. My DSL provider mailed me a new one (a level of service I did not expect) and it's reliable but universally slow. So our current mode of operation is to use the old one until it drops and then switch to the new one for a few hours. Weird. So I think we need to buy a new modem that is both reliable and fast, but since I thought they were all the same I now don't know what to look for. (We have basic DSL. Someday I hope they well run FIOS to our neighborhood and we'll switch.)

Recent conversation:
Dani: We're out of (book)shelf space in the library again.
Me: Maybe we should assemble that last bookcase we bought.
Dani: We're out of shelf space in the library again.
Me: You built it and filled it already? So we need to buy more?
Dani: We're out of wall space to put bookcases...

(I assert that he is incorrect on that last point, but it hinges on a dispute between practicality and purity. Or something like that.)

We bought some CFLs (in two different color-tones) to try again, and installed some in the ceiling fixture in the living room (the packaging contained no dire warnings about that, unlike the last one). Freaky white and bright, so some tuning is called for, but there might be a bigger problem: flicker. The switch is a dimmer, but we know CFLs don't dim so the switch is at max. (Truth to tell, we don't dim regular bulbs in that fixture, either.) Does the mere presence of a dimmer switch doom CFLs? That would be annoying.

A couple links:

A few nights ago I made these lamb chops, which I've made before and which are amazingly good.

The ten plagues, done in peeps (from someone on my subscription list, but I've lost track of who). Twisted! Funny!

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good customer service

Wednesday night our DSL was out, not for the first time (we get little glitches, and occasionally outages of an hour or so). This one ran longer than usual, so around 10PM I called to report it. I got the same person I've always gotten when I call, no matter what time; it's the same person who sold me the service in the first place.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Our service has been out for a couple hours. I've done the usual debugging and power-cycling.

Him: It seems to be you. Happen much?

Me: We get this from time to time. Is it likely to be our 1999 modem?

Him: Yeah. I'll send you a new one, or you can come pick one up.

Me: I wouldn't have expected our service to come with a free modem. I was going to buy one.

Him: I'm happy to send it.

It came in today's mail, so as soon as we hit Radio Shack for some filters, we should be good to go. Kudos, Nidhog!

Entry tags:

home-internet

Telerama's support log

From Telerama's network-status page, chronicled here for posterity, a partial log of what went wrong, with some implied lessons in customer service. (Their log is short on technical details, FYI.)

( most of you don't care; some might enjoy train wrecks )

This morning our new service with Nidhog kicked in. Yay! To the best of my knowledge Telerama is still not back.

Entry tags:

home-internet

smoke signals

DSL partially came back tonight (so over 3 days of outage). I can get to my shell account and read mail, but non-cached web pages (like, say, anything on LJ) are timing out. (Name service works; HTTP service then times out. Dunno what that means given that outbound ssh/telnet works.) Dani can get to his Telerama shell account but can't use it to read his email, which resides on a different Telerama server.

Friday we ordered DSL service from Nidhog, a small provider I'd never heard of before Thursday but that said they could get us up quickly. The swtich-over is blocked at Verizon now; the folks at Nidhog thought we might get connected today, but I guess not. (I am tentatively holding a Wednesday appointment with Comcast, but I hope to cancel that.) The person I talked with at Nidhog seemed clueful and eager to please; I imagine that they can pick up a significant-to-them pile of new business if they do this right. I'm all for that. :-)

Several of my coworkers use(d) Telerama and we have a wiki, so naturally there's been some information-sharing. The discussion there led me to discover that Telerama has dropped its price for our service level, yet they never told us or reduced our price. Which, you know, might not be unreasonable (caveat emptor) if they ever actually delivered the promised connection speeds... Well, with luck we'll be done with them soon. The cause of the outage, according to the press, is a $30,000 bill with their provider that they cannot pay. I didn't expect service to come back at all.

Entry tags:

home-internet,
viz

at least something is going right...

My employer restricts internet access, even on the alleged "guest network" that clients can use. Our parent company (real parent, not adoptive parent) has wireless in their part of the space, but it's locked down and I've heard conflicting things about getting access. Thus far I'd been unable to get the right people to make the right settings to get on, and I wasn't sure how hard to push. (I mean, it's not like they owe us or anything.) I brought my laptop in today, figuring I'd go to a public access point sometime during the day.

This morning I just happened to walk into the building with parent-company's top dog. I took the opportunity to ask, all casual-like, whether their wireless network was open to us. He said something like "it should be; you'll need to get access", and I mentioned that my DSL was out at home and I was hoping to get my iBook on their approved list, and he perked up at "iBook" (he's a Mac snob) and, well, one thing led to another and by the time we had reached the office entrance, I was explaining that I was new to the Mac and trying to find out what all the fuss was about, and he was enthusing about "oh you must try this, and let me show you this, and...", and by the way sure he'd call $IT_GUY and get me onto their network, which he did right then and there.

The signal doesn't reach my desk, but at least now I can go to (or near) their space and get network access, without having to leave the building. Yay!

Meanwhile, Telerama's customer-support number is now redirecting callers to the collections department of their provider. Essentially, they're trying to sic their customers on their source and get us in the middle of a "he said, she said" fight about a past-due payment. (Telerama claims they were cut off with one day's notice. I don't know if that's true, but this just makes them look even more incompetent. Among things, if they had any notice at all they should have notified their customers!) Even if they don't die as a result of this, I think we need to find service elsewhere, and quickly. I wish FiOS was available in my neighborhood.

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gee, thanks Telerama

I understand that sometimes DSL service fails for hours on end. It can happen to anyone.

But. You should answer the damn phone when people call to report problems, or say that you're closed (though at 7:30PM that would be unreasonable for a local ISP). What you should not do is have your voice-mail system claim to be routing the call to a representative and then go our to the movies or something while the customer waits. (And, psst: doing this after offering someone a rep for "new sales" is especially braindead.)

Telerama used to have clues. I hope to learn in the morning, via my then-working connection, that they still do and that they've been somehow hacked. That's not how I'm betting, though.

It is, of course, not in the least Telerama's fault that access from work is severely curtailed (even if I bring in my own machine so I can't possibly expose corporate assets to the wilds of the net). This merely adds to the frustration. There's a free hotspot at Pita Pit near work, so I think I know where I'm getting lunch tomorrow. :-) (Suggestions for free hotspots near Squirrel Hill welcome, in case this goes on for a while. I already know about T-Mobile at $6/hour.)

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home-internet

hardware failure (but not all at once)

This morning we had no network, and I work for people who assume that if I'm allowed unfettered access to the internet I'm going to set up a kiddy-porn business fueled by stolen credit card numbers, so I actually do rely on checking email (and LJ) in the morning before work and in the evening when I get home. When our DSL provide said "nope, no problems here" I began to suspect our venerable modem (circa 1999; we tried to upgrade once but then we couldn't use our phone for voice so we reverted). But, it turned out, the problem was in the LinkSys router and intermittant. I connected directly to the modem and was fine, but that obviously doesn't work in a multi-computer household. When I reset things to use the router I had a brief glimmer of network access -- enough to establish an SSH connection and then it died again. I called Dani to warn him that this might not be the best night for his planned Diablo game.

Tonight things had deteriorated; the router wasn't serving bits even long enough to make an outside connection. Dani went off to the land of hardware while I tried to harvest the current machine for its settings (things like static IP address, gateway, etc). Yes, they're now written down and stored in the box the new router came in. The half-life of router connectivity was low and falling -- I turned it on and connected to the admin console and then it failed, and after a pause I did it again and just barely got the second page of settings, and after that no matter how quick I was with the plug and the browser refresh I wasn't getting any more. It's one of the odder hardware failures I've seen; I expect "work" or "don't work", but not this.

Dani came home with two options (after confirming a return policy). First we tried the no-name combination modem/router (with wireless and wired). The installer software (yes, software) was annoying and we couldn't get a connection. The documentation sucked. We set it aside.

So plan B was a newer LinkSys box, on the theory that we'd already climbed the learning curve. It took about 5 minutes to set up. It works fine. It took until 10:00 to get there, but we're back now. Whee.

I'm still suspicious of our modem's remaining lifetime, but with luck that's a problem for a different day.