My Internet connection has been horrible the last few weeks and after the cable guy checked the external connection I went in for renting a “modem” from “the company.” With some people, the story ends there. With me (to my wife’s chagrin) that is not even the “Cliff’s Notes” of the story.
I have my modem running through the surge suppressor power bar that supports my computer and I even run the data cable throughit just in case. I unhooked the regular cable and put a short high quality between the wall jack and the modem and just used a long ethernet cable to reach the computer. Then I plugged into the jack that works for the TV (even though my regular jack is 8 inches from the “point of demarcation.” Cable issues are now ruled out.
When I do get online I decide to quantify my downtime. I set up a cron job on the web server here to call a php file which uses cURL to visit the server on my computer to see if it can be reached every five minutes. Successes and failures are recorded in a MySQL database. I can also check accesses in my local logs. Due to problems with CURLOPT_PORT I have to run http through port 80 which makes me nervous (I have since closed port 80 and just run http through a non-standard port).
I play around in my router and spend way too much time digging around inside http://192.168.0.1. Then I start playing around inside my Terayon TJ715x cable modem at http://192.168.100.1 and watching everything its doing. I do this enough that I add them into my hosts file so i can access them as “router” and “modem” respectively. I watched it continually jump back and forth between “Tuning” and “Ranging” which made me wonder if there was interference on the Internet Channel. Looking in on the modem diagnostics and modem log page (password: icu4at! ) weren’t much help either.
In the end I have taken my old modem which I received from Cox Cable two years ago and opened it up to see its innards (looking for some interesting legal hacks for it) and I am paying $3 per month to rent an identical used modem from Comcast.
Fun, fun, fun. Hopefully I can get back to more regular access at home. One friend at work has already told me I have been sounding a bit depressed due to the network problems.
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