![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Well, that was embarrassing...
Jul. 7th, 2013 01:33 pmI've been having problems getting my windows 7 laptop to talk to my wifi point. All the parameters appear to correct and the MAC address seems to be in the ACL, but for some reason the thing just won't connect unless I drop the access controls on the router.
So there I was, in the middle of trying to fix the problem for once and all when my network dropped. I tried to log back in to the router. No dice. I tried to ping my linux box. Again, nothing. I checked my IP address settings and discovered they were completely wrong: the router had clearly crashed and reset itself to its factory defaults. And, of course, being a professional computer scientist, I had no backups, no note of my DSL password, and the only ISP documentation I was able to find dated back to 1997. Oops.
Fortunately, I was able to guess the default password for the admin account, configure the LAN with the right set of addresses, located the phone number of my ISP in a recent email — which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the same as 16 years ago — and got an extremely helpful person on the service desk to reset my password for me. After a minor glitch — I mistyped the password he gave me — I got myself back on-line after an outage of around an hour
I feel like I've learnt a few valuable lessons: take regular backups; keep a hardcopy of important documentation; and ensure passwords are kept somewhere safe. And, as a corollary, consider whether the time has come to get a smartphone...
So there I was, in the middle of trying to fix the problem for once and all when my network dropped. I tried to log back in to the router. No dice. I tried to ping my linux box. Again, nothing. I checked my IP address settings and discovered they were completely wrong: the router had clearly crashed and reset itself to its factory defaults. And, of course, being a professional computer scientist, I had no backups, no note of my DSL password, and the only ISP documentation I was able to find dated back to 1997. Oops.
Fortunately, I was able to guess the default password for the admin account, configure the LAN with the right set of addresses, located the phone number of my ISP in a recent email — which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the same as 16 years ago — and got an extremely helpful person on the service desk to reset my password for me. After a minor glitch — I mistyped the password he gave me — I got myself back on-line after an outage of around an hour
I feel like I've learnt a few valuable lessons: take regular backups; keep a hardcopy of important documentation; and ensure passwords are kept somewhere safe. And, as a corollary, consider whether the time has come to get a smartphone...
