As predicted, UPS attempted to deliver my new router from Verizon on Monday while I was at work. As a signature was required, the driver didn't drop it off and left a note telling me that they would make two more attempts.
I went online and had them deliver it to my work, so yesterday afternoon it got delivered there.
It came with this "In-Home Agent" software designed to simplify certain tasks such as setting up wireless, and to automate some troubleshooting actions (for Internet, TV, and Phone). The notes with the router said to install and run that software immediately upon hooking up the router, and to run the "Quick Fix" for setting up your replacement router.
I hooked up the router and found that, without having to run the software, it immediately started working.
My level of Internet service is for a 35 Mbps downstream connection. On the old router, I typically got about 32 Mbps, which is in the acceptable range, since most of the time you're not likely to get the top advertised speed, and, seriously, 32 Mbps is pretty goddamn fast.
With the Linksys router I was using until I got the FiOS router, I was getting 23 Mbps, which is understandable, given that it's an older router not optimized for the FiOS connection.
I did a speed test with the router and was pleased to discover that I was getting more than my maximum speed: over 42 Mbps.
I was puzzled, but pleased.
Later, when I went to set up wireless on my laptop, which I opted to do manually rather than using the software, I noted something odd. The ESSID - the "name" that the router broadcasts for wireless devices to connect to - was written on the side of the router, as was the security key for connecting to that ESSID, but in the list of available wireless networks on my laptop, I wasn't seeing the ESSID listed on the router.
While I hadn't run the replacement router "Quick Fix," I had installed the software, and I saw that there was a function for finding your router's ESSID and key. I ran that and found that they were completely different from what was on the router's label.
That's when I figured things out.
The ESSID being broadcast contained the word "test."
So, prior to shipping out the router, Verizon had changed its configuration in order to test the router's functionality. This likely explains the significant boost in speed.
It's also likely that this means that if I did run that router replacement "Quick Fix," it would reset the router to its default configuration, and I suspect that would mean I would lose the extra speed.
Yeah, I'm not planning on running that "Quick Fix."
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
I’m Back! What Do You Mean You Didn’t Know I Was Gone?
Last night I was moving from room to room and computer to computer installing some programs and updates on two of my four systems, and on one of them – Munin – I noticed a little icon indicating that I had no Internet connectivity.
I went into my office and sat at Hugin to see if this was a problem across my network.
Yep.
I looked at my router and saw that most of the lights were off. It was a bit after midnight, so I concluded that maybe there was a maintenance going on or something, so I ignored it as best I could. That lasted about a half an hour, at which point I decided to power-cycle the router. Once it powered back up, most of the lights remained off, and I noticed that the lights that were on were very dim.
Some time back I got a package in the mail from Verizon containing a new power supply for my router, as there was some sort of recall on the old one. I’d hooked it up and found that whatever fire danger the old supply may have posed was worth dealing with, since the new power supply didn’t seem to be able to actually supply power. None of the lights would come on and stay on, they’d just sort of…pulsate.
In any case, I decided to give it another shot last night to see if it would work and provide steady power to the router.
Nope. Just pulsating lights (this time only the two that were lighting up when it was on the old power supply). I switched back to the old power supply and found that now I was getting no lights whatsoever. Trying the new one again led to one pulsating light.
So my router – close to three years old, which is ancient in computer technology terms – was dead.
I called in to Verizon support, who, upon hearing the description of the issue decided it would be a waste of time to bother troubleshooting and confirming what I already knew, set up the shipment of a new router.
Which is great, except that it was Friday night/Saturday morning, and the new router wouldn’t arrive until, at the earliest, Monday. And seeing as how UPS likes to deliver things when people aren’t home to sign for them, that would mean that I’d have to wait for them to make three failed attempts to deliver it before they would let me just go to the damn depot and pick it up. (The Verizon tech said they always let him just pick things up after the first failed attempt, but that’s never been the case for me. They always insist on trying three times.)
So I asked if it was possible to just connect my computer directly to the Ethernet port on the wall and at least have connectivity that way. He said that it was, and that all I needed to do was a release and renew of my IP address.
The one problem was that I didn’t actually have an IP address to release, or to renew. That was all he knew how to do, though, so I was boned.
I told him I’d play around with it and see what I could figure out. I busted out my old Linksys router and hooked that up, but no luck. Still, a quick Google search would – oh, right.
To get online, I fired up an app on my cell phone that lets me turn my cell phone into a WiFi hotspot and connect to the Internet via the phone’s data connection. It worked pretty well, but while it was faster than the shitty connection I had back in my condo with that shitty, shitty, absolutely terrible cable company Direcpath, it was unbearably slow, and not at all suitable as an acceptable interim solution until my new router arrived.
(And while the connection between the phone and computer was solid, the phone’s data connection would frequently drop, rendering it useless.)
Nothing I could find online provided any help with getting my Linksys to work with the FiOS. At one point I headed to Wal-Mart and to two Best Buys to see if they sold the FiOS-specific router (the router manufacturer listed them as retail stores that carry their products).
Why yes, I was going to go out and spend money to get something that I’m already going to get for free in a few days. What’s your point? I’m impatient and I thought it would be worthwhile to have a spare.
Alas, it was not to be.
Earlier this evening I decided to call in and see if maybe there was something actually wrong with my FiOS that was merely coincident with the demise of my router, since I was convinced that, given that it’s just an Ethernet connection, either plugging directly into the computer or through a router should work.
The person who answered my call told me that it wouldn’t. I said that I was sure that it would. She looked into a few things and ran a line test and was, I could tell – I did work in a call center myself, after all – that she was reaching out to more tech-savvy co-workers (via IM or chat) for assistance. Initially she told me some nonsense about Modulation and DeModulation and how I needed my router to “translate” the signal to me. I knew this wasn’t true because that would mean I had a modem (Modulate/De-Modulate is what that stands for, after all) rather than a router, though I didn’t initially call her on it.
(I didn’t want to confuse the issue further by telling her that I had a router hooked up, so I told her that I was directly connected from the computer to the wall. Ultimately it made no difference; whatever settings I’d need to change on the computer to get it to work would simply need to be changed on the router instead.)
As I suspected, she thought I was using DSL. I reiterated that I have FiOS. This led her to pursue a different avenue of thought, and ultimately she found what she – and I – needed to know: my connection is PPoE, not DHCP. (It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what that means.)
So the problem was that I needed to set the router to PP0E and provide authentication credentials. Namely my verizon.net login information. I had no idea what that information was, as I hadn’t needed it when connecting via the FiOS router. Fortunately, she was able to provide my username and reset my password, and as soon as I set the router to PPoE and provided the login information, boom! I was back, baby!
And that was the one bright spot in an otherwise irritating day, about which more later.
As it stands, with my current set-up, my Set-Top Box/DVR isn’t getting an Internet feed, so after it gets past the point of what it has saved, I will lose my guide, and I can’t do any Video On Demand stuff, but the Internet is the important thing.
I suppose it’s kind of sad how dependent I am on the Internet. Honestly, most of my time at home on the computer isn’t spent doing a lot on the Internet, but not having it at my fingertips is frustrating, so I’m glad to at least have that one – and only that one; again, more later – frustration out of the way.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Boring Day Entry
In addition to picking up an HD DVD player on Wednesday – specifically the HD-A30 – I also decided to bite the bullet and finally pick up the Absolute New Frontier at the comic shop. I’d been wanting it for a while and decided that it was as good a time as any to get it over with and buy the thing. The quick flip-through that I gave it confirms that it looks really good: sharp, crisp colors, nice paper stock, and some excellent extras such as character designs and various other goodies.
On Tuesday, shortly after the Verizon tech who’d gotten my Internet working again had left, I noticed that it wasn’t quite as zippy as it been during the brief time that it had worked on Monday. Various speed tests confirmed that I was “only” getting 5 Mbps down. Now, this is a respectable speed, and is five times better than what I was getting from DirecPath, but it’s not the 15 Mbps that I’m paying for.
So I called Verizon once again and was greeted by their automated phone system which ran some tests and concluded that I needed to talk to an actual person. However, rather than transferring me to an actual person, it told me that one would call me within six hours and then hung up on me.
No one ever did call me until nearly 7 PM the next day, but the person who did call had good news, as he had found the problem – I’d been set to the default speed of 5 Mbps – and corrected it.
So now I have the extreme speeds again, and I was able to set up my wireless network without screwing anything up.
David, my Realtor, stopped by on Tuesday to give me a housewarming gift (a nice set of dishes) and to check the place out. He said that while it’s clear that I’m not finished with organizing and decorating the place it’s already nicer than it was when the former owner was living in it.
Certainly it’s considerably less cluttered, and turning the dining room back into a dining room frees up a lot of room in the kitchen, which, while decently-sized, isn’t really big enough to be an eat-in kitchen.
So far it’s been a very slow day at work, as per usual, and more boring than usual, as I didn’t bring my laptop in, so I don’t have my collection of mp3s to listen to, or the ability to do any online tutorials.
I didn’t want to bring in the laptop as now that we’re in the new NOC there seems to be a stricter adherence to the rules, and bringing in non-business laptops has always been against the rules, though most managers have been willing to overlook it on Saturdays.
Now? I’m not so sure, as we aren’t even allowed unfettered access to our workstations – they’re locked inside cabinets.
We have speakers, but they don’t have headphone jacks, so it’s difficult to listen to music unobtrusively.
On the plus side, it’s not as ice cold in here as it was in the old NOC, though the warmth seems to lead me to drink a lot more water. It seems like I’m constantly refilling my mug, much more frequently that I did in the old NOC, and I already drank a lot of water there.
Maybe it’s not the warmth, though. It could be that the water here is better. After all, I’m getting it from an actual water cooler, not the filtered water dispenser.
Either way, all that water makes the fact that there is only one set of bathrooms which are closed for cleaning for over an hour on weekdays that much more troublesome.
On Tuesday, shortly after the Verizon tech who’d gotten my Internet working again had left, I noticed that it wasn’t quite as zippy as it been during the brief time that it had worked on Monday. Various speed tests confirmed that I was “only” getting 5 Mbps down. Now, this is a respectable speed, and is five times better than what I was getting from DirecPath, but it’s not the 15 Mbps that I’m paying for.
So I called Verizon once again and was greeted by their automated phone system which ran some tests and concluded that I needed to talk to an actual person. However, rather than transferring me to an actual person, it told me that one would call me within six hours and then hung up on me.
No one ever did call me until nearly 7 PM the next day, but the person who did call had good news, as he had found the problem – I’d been set to the default speed of 5 Mbps – and corrected it.
So now I have the extreme speeds again, and I was able to set up my wireless network without screwing anything up.
David, my Realtor, stopped by on Tuesday to give me a housewarming gift (a nice set of dishes) and to check the place out. He said that while it’s clear that I’m not finished with organizing and decorating the place it’s already nicer than it was when the former owner was living in it.
Certainly it’s considerably less cluttered, and turning the dining room back into a dining room frees up a lot of room in the kitchen, which, while decently-sized, isn’t really big enough to be an eat-in kitchen.
So far it’s been a very slow day at work, as per usual, and more boring than usual, as I didn’t bring my laptop in, so I don’t have my collection of mp3s to listen to, or the ability to do any online tutorials.
I didn’t want to bring in the laptop as now that we’re in the new NOC there seems to be a stricter adherence to the rules, and bringing in non-business laptops has always been against the rules, though most managers have been willing to overlook it on Saturdays.
Now? I’m not so sure, as we aren’t even allowed unfettered access to our workstations – they’re locked inside cabinets.
We have speakers, but they don’t have headphone jacks, so it’s difficult to listen to music unobtrusively.
On the plus side, it’s not as ice cold in here as it was in the old NOC, though the warmth seems to lead me to drink a lot more water. It seems like I’m constantly refilling my mug, much more frequently that I did in the old NOC, and I already drank a lot of water there.
Maybe it’s not the warmth, though. It could be that the water here is better. After all, I’m getting it from an actual water cooler, not the filtered water dispenser.
Either way, all that water makes the fact that there is only one set of bathrooms which are closed for cleaning for over an hour on weekdays that much more troublesome.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
The Internet, Take Two (Bonus: Car Repairs!)
So yesterday, after weeks of waiting, was finally the day on which Verizon showed up to connect my super-fast FiOS Internet.
The tech arrived around 9 AM and was optimistic that it wouldn't take long or much work.
That immediately made me suspicious.
He soon regretted saying it.
The previous owner had only had FiOS Internet, not Internet and TV, and having both requires that there be a cable jack in the same room as the Ethernet jack.
I picked the room that had the Ethernet jack as my office (for other reasons besides that), but naturally that ensured that it was the only bedroom without a cable jack.
So he had to take the time to install a new dual jack that had Ethernet and cable outlets, which meant drilling some holes so that he could run a cable to the attic and down into the closet in the office, and also run a cable from the cable box to the phone/network box.
So that took a while, and even after it was done, the router – I have to use a Verizon-specific wireless router in order for the connection to work – wasn’t getting a signal lock.
So he had to totally replace the network box.
Eventually, 3+ hours later, he had it up and running and it was amazing. I downloaded a 1.5 GB file in about 10 minutes.
He then got to setting up my TV and DVR service, which went off mostly without a hitch, except that for some reason they’d neglected to include all of the non-premium HD channels in my packet. He told me that they probably wouldn’t be turned on until the next day, but I wasn’t terribly concerned, as I was at least getting all of the networks’ HD channels.
So he left and everything was cool.
Until I went back up to the office and decided I would set up a wireless network with the new router.
I went to the router’s config page and tried to log in with the default information.
No luck, so, per the instructions on Verizon’s FiOS site, I held in the “reset” button for ten seconds to restore it to factory default.
When it came back up the Internet light wouldn’t come back on and I no longer had connectivity.
I called tech support, who concluded that the router must have fried when I reset it, so they would dispatch someone in the morning with a replacement.
*Sigh* So after waiting for weeks and finally getting super-fast Internet, I killed it within an hour.
This morning the tech showed up, hooked up a new router, and it was the same deal.
Eventually he was able to determine that the problem was that the previous tech had hooked it up so that the networking was entirely via coax rather than coax and Ethernet.
The router needs to be connected to the coax, as the DVR uses the router to download the program guide, on demand programming, and the information for the widgets (little on-screen graphics that tell you the weather and traffic conditions and etc.), and the first tech apparently thought it was easiest to just have the whole thing running on coax. In fact, on the new network box he’d installed, he didn’t even connect the Ethernet to the house.
Long story short, the second tech simply plugged in the Ethernet to the house and got the router to connect that way.
So now I have Internet.
I’d gotten up early yesterday to be sure to be ready when the Verizon tech arrived, and I had to get up early again this morning to be ready when the second tech arrived, and also to bring my car into the shop.
Some time ago the car started making a noise and had a slight shudder. Noise and shudder eventually got worse, so I brought it in to get checked out.
Turns out the problem was from worn out tires and a bent rim. So I have to get new tires and a new rim. Not sure how this didn’t get noticed when I had my safety inspection done, as I doubt that the wear and the bending happened in under a month, and the last time I had the tires replaced it was determined that it needed to be done as a result of my safety inspection.
Oh well.
In any case, I’m going to post this while I have a working connection, and I’m going to leave said connection alone for a while before I try setting up the wireless network.
The tech arrived around 9 AM and was optimistic that it wouldn't take long or much work.
That immediately made me suspicious.
He soon regretted saying it.
The previous owner had only had FiOS Internet, not Internet and TV, and having both requires that there be a cable jack in the same room as the Ethernet jack.
I picked the room that had the Ethernet jack as my office (for other reasons besides that), but naturally that ensured that it was the only bedroom without a cable jack.
So he had to take the time to install a new dual jack that had Ethernet and cable outlets, which meant drilling some holes so that he could run a cable to the attic and down into the closet in the office, and also run a cable from the cable box to the phone/network box.
So that took a while, and even after it was done, the router – I have to use a Verizon-specific wireless router in order for the connection to work – wasn’t getting a signal lock.
So he had to totally replace the network box.
Eventually, 3+ hours later, he had it up and running and it was amazing. I downloaded a 1.5 GB file in about 10 minutes.
He then got to setting up my TV and DVR service, which went off mostly without a hitch, except that for some reason they’d neglected to include all of the non-premium HD channels in my packet. He told me that they probably wouldn’t be turned on until the next day, but I wasn’t terribly concerned, as I was at least getting all of the networks’ HD channels.
So he left and everything was cool.
Until I went back up to the office and decided I would set up a wireless network with the new router.
I went to the router’s config page and tried to log in with the default information.
No luck, so, per the instructions on Verizon’s FiOS site, I held in the “reset” button for ten seconds to restore it to factory default.
When it came back up the Internet light wouldn’t come back on and I no longer had connectivity.
I called tech support, who concluded that the router must have fried when I reset it, so they would dispatch someone in the morning with a replacement.
*Sigh* So after waiting for weeks and finally getting super-fast Internet, I killed it within an hour.
This morning the tech showed up, hooked up a new router, and it was the same deal.
Eventually he was able to determine that the problem was that the previous tech had hooked it up so that the networking was entirely via coax rather than coax and Ethernet.
The router needs to be connected to the coax, as the DVR uses the router to download the program guide, on demand programming, and the information for the widgets (little on-screen graphics that tell you the weather and traffic conditions and etc.), and the first tech apparently thought it was easiest to just have the whole thing running on coax. In fact, on the new network box he’d installed, he didn’t even connect the Ethernet to the house.
Long story short, the second tech simply plugged in the Ethernet to the house and got the router to connect that way.
So now I have Internet.
I’d gotten up early yesterday to be sure to be ready when the Verizon tech arrived, and I had to get up early again this morning to be ready when the second tech arrived, and also to bring my car into the shop.
Some time ago the car started making a noise and had a slight shudder. Noise and shudder eventually got worse, so I brought it in to get checked out.
Turns out the problem was from worn out tires and a bent rim. So I have to get new tires and a new rim. Not sure how this didn’t get noticed when I had my safety inspection done, as I doubt that the wear and the bending happened in under a month, and the last time I had the tires replaced it was determined that it needed to be done as a result of my safety inspection.
Oh well.
In any case, I’m going to post this while I have a working connection, and I’m going to leave said connection alone for a while before I try setting up the wireless network.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Surfing The Qorld Qide Qeb
Every so often, if you read the sort of geeky articles I read, you'll run into articles about things like Internet 2, and various other potential successors to the Internet of today.
For my part, I'm not so much concerned about a new Internet of the future, I'm looking for parallel Internets.
They would basically be carbon-copies of the current Internet, and their purpose would be to take me to where I intended to go when I fat-fingered it and entered "qqq" or "eee" instead of "www" in my browser's address bar.
It doesn't seem like so much to ask for.
For my part, I'm not so much concerned about a new Internet of the future, I'm looking for parallel Internets.
They would basically be carbon-copies of the current Internet, and their purpose would be to take me to where I intended to go when I fat-fingered it and entered "qqq" or "eee" instead of "www" in my browser's address bar.
It doesn't seem like so much to ask for.
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