* * * * *
“Static IP Addresses? Where art thou?”
Ever since this weekend [1] our Internet connection here at the Facility in
the Middle of Nowhere has been somewhat flaky. On Tuesday I had to call tech
support since the connection was dropped and both a reset and a powercycle of
the cable modem were insufficient in restoring a connection. The tech (in
Buffalo, NY) read through his script (“Please unplug the power to both the
cable modem and your computer.”) and I played along when it seemed necessary
(“Okay, my computer has finished booting.” “But it's only been 10 seconds! It
took me several hours to optimize my computer to boot in under 40 seconds!”
“It's a fast machine.”) and the connection was restored.
Wednesday, there was an outtage of a few minutes, and then there was today.
Today, we lost the connection again. Repeating the operations from Tuesday
didn't help and it was then that I had a sinking feeling that, quite
possibly, I lost my DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) lease. When we
first obtained the connection, I ran the DHCP client once to get an address,
then statically programmed that in for the occasional reboot. Never had a
problem, and the IP (Internet Protocol) address was bound to the MAC (Media
Access Control) address on my Ethernet card.
But apparently, not anymore.
The cable modem finally resynced, but none of our traffic was going anywhere.
But once I re-ran the DHCP client and obtained a new IP address, the Internet
beckoned.
God, I wish for the days when I had thirty-two (32!) static IP addresses,
with control of the reverse DNS (Domain Name Service) lookups. It's barely
tolerable with one (1) static IP address but a dynamic address?
Let's just say I find dynamic IP addresses annoying (there's the changes to
DNS so I can log in to my home network from elsewhere, and changes to the
SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) server I use to allow outgoing email,
and … )
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/03/23.1
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