Yep, it's down for me!
Seems my ISP is having routing problems. A bit of traceroute and ping seems to indicate the USA has either vanished, or someone has unplugged it. If you’re in the Atlantic and you find a big fat wire could you leave it alone, ta.
Am now engaged in highly pointless but fun games of SSH to get back into IRC.
There I was, happily Consuming some Internet and doing my part to fill popular social networking sites with noise when … things started to go a bit funny. First browsing stopped working, then Skype went offline followed by Google Talk finally noticing my Internet was offline. After some investigation I noticed my ADSL router no longer had an IP address but was syched with the line.
So I switched it off, waited a bit, switched it back on… Lights flashed, lights went green… then orange. Orange is a bad colour, it means “something is broken”. Thinking that maybe my ISP had finally got around to enabling my static IP address I configured that. Lights went green, but no data flowed. Having run out of options I dug out the router provided by my ISP (it was in the loft in a box, it’s not very good) and that also failed to work. Just to check things over I plugged in the ADSL router I used to use before I moved house – this one hadn’t been reconfigured or messed with since I unplugged it in my old house. That didn’t work either, it also didn’t sync at a speed faster than 7Mb so that went away again.
There then followed a series of support ticket requests with my ISP, with my problem being escalated to higher and higher levels of support technician. I even requested a line test from BT after my ADSL router decided to tell me “No ATM activity detected on line”. To further confuse matters, my ISP rang me on my landline and I couldn’t hear them, but they use some nasty VOIP rubbish for their calls, so I figured that was broken and hung up. Then I picked up the phone again and … it was dead. Uh oh. But my ADSL was still synched OK. Err…
Another support ticket from my ISP solved everything. They gave me the details for my static IP address again and also told me my phone handset is probably faulty as they could hear me fine. I phoned myself using my mobile phone and sure enough, my cordless phones are broken. Nothing to do with my Internet being down, but irritating all the same. Now got a corded phone plugged in and a renewed desire to work out where these phone extension wires run so I can use them.
The source of all this weird confusion and problems? My static IP address details were wrong… or perhaps not wrong, but different. I think the house move process went a bit wonky and I got a new static IP address assigned to me. Or they couldn’t figure out why nothing was working and gave me a new one, the support technician did say he couldn’t ping me either at one point. They even had the phone exchange configuration reset and tested to make sure that was correct, so at least I now know I have a properly working line with no errors.
Tomorrow I might give this post a try to see if I can convince my Zyxel router to do more than 7 meg.
I’ve not seen this before…
I suppose something broke in an interesting way. I wonder if the block of data means anything. If it happens again I’ll capture it and see if there’s anything to decode.
I’ve spent the past 18 months with my Android phone (this is not an Android/iPhone debate) and didn’t really make use of the mobile Internet or its various apps. I own an iPod Touch (1st gen) and use that for music every day in my car and in my bedside clockradio.
I also use my iPod Touch a lot for quick browsing, gaming and a bit of youtube viewing and find its small screen really irritating. It’s useful though being able to pick it up, prod a button and discover if I have any new email without having to wait for my laptop or netbook to wake up. Or I’ll be watching telly and want to look something up.
See, I don’t really use my mobile phone and am quite happy with a cheapo one on pay-as-you-go. If i had an iPhone it’d combine my current iPod Touch with a phone in one unit which is convenient. If I had an iPad it’d be like a giant iPod Touch which is useful but wouldn’t fit in the dock connector on my clockradio and might look a bit strange in my car. I do also own a Macbook and a small netbook – although they tend to stay plugged in as their battery lives are pretty awful. The battery life on my Android phone was equally crap – what’s the point of a phone with fancy stuff that drains the battery within a few hours?
I am quite happy to own a cheap 10 quid mobile phone, but do find mobile Internet useful at random times.
There’s a bridge I drive past every day on my way home from work. It’s a fairly uninteresting railway bridge apart from a small piece of graffiti sprayed on the top of it.
All your base
If you don’t get the reference, you obviously don’t spend enough time on the Internet.
