When I was growing up, my mother told me about a headline in a London newspaper – apocryphal, I now realize – that read: “Fog in the Channel, Continent Isolated.” Hold that thought.
I woke up Saturday morning and grabbed my iPad to check on the news before I got out of bed. After a few minutes, I stopped getting updates, and the iPad claimed that it had lost Internet connection. Thinking that it could be a Wi-Fi problem, I went to a computer with a hardwired Ethernet connection, and refreshed the browser. Chrome complained of a DNS lookup failure. I wondered if it could be a DNS problem; I didn’t think so, since I had added Google’s DNS servers to my forwarders list. I pulled up a command line window and was unable to ping anything beyond my local router. so the DNS lookups were failing because there was no Internet access at all..
I told my wife that the world had lost Internet communications with us, and went to take a bath. Afterwards, all was well.
My backup Internet access, through Wildblue, hadn’t functioned. As when I was having the DNS problems earlier, the firewall reported no connection to the satellite router. I’d ignored that for too long, and decided to try to fix it.
The Wildblue antenna is on the roof of the garage, and there is no Category five wiring between the garage and the utility/server room in the main house. There is however, a 25 pair Category three cable. I am using NetSys Ethernet extenders to transmit the Ethernet signals over category three Cable. The two NetSys boxes negotiate a communication speed – either five, 10, or 25 Mb/s – depending on the length and quality of the Category three cable; they indicate which speed was negotiated by lighting one of three LEDs on the front panels of both the local and remote boxes. No lights were lit on either box, indicating no communications between them, although the power and Ethernet connection lights were lit on both boxes.
I power cycled the boxes at both ends, to no avail. I traced out the wiring, and it looked good. I figured I would check for problems in the wiring by taking the remote box from the garage, bringing it into the house and connecting it directly to the local box. When I did that, the power and Ethernet lights no longer lit, although the lights indicating the communication speed flickered slightly upon power up. That was strange; the power and Ethernet lights should work independent of the location of the box. I took the remote box back to the garage, and powered it up: no power or Ethernet lights. It wasn’t clear what I did to break it, but it appeared the remote box was nonfunctional.
I went to the NetSys site on the web, and found that it was not possible for me to order just the remote box, so I ordered a new pair. I ordered a different model this time, since they now have Ethernet extender boxes that are optimized for my intended use, with asymmetrical bandwidth, higher in the download direction than the upload direction. They new boxes are also faster, which should come in handy should I upgrade the satellite connection to the new Exede service.
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