How to Handle an Internet Outage

canadian_right writes "Do you know what to do if your internet connection goes down? This article includes many helpful tips, including a functional use for AOL disks."

Comments

At My School...

[crass751]

I go to a small technological university in Northern, New York. We're almost really in Canada. Needless to say 75% of the school is dorks, we have few women, so one of the few things we do have is a very shaky internet connection. Downtime is usually a daily thing, and can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

There exists a non-school supported forum for members of the campus community. It's part of a network of sites, called the Daily Jolt. (What geeks do when they're bored) It's really nothing more than a place for all us geeks to hide behind our monitors and bitch anonymously.

When the network gets fritzy, we all try to get to the forum and bitch about how much we hate our Office of Information Technology (OIT) here. If we can't get to the forum, we bitch to someone in person, usually a roommate, until we can vent on the forum. After an outage, the first page of posts is usually all OIT-related.

Wow, in just typing this I realized how sad my life really is.

Where's that AOL CD?

Re:At My School...

[Lifewolf]

When the network gets fritzy, we all try to get to the forum and bitch about how much we hate our Office of Information Technology (OIT) here. If we can't get to the forum, we bitch to someone in person, usually a roommate, until we can vent on the forum.

When I was in school, Internet access was provided by a bank of 2400 baud modems and a terminal server. Every few days the terminal server would lock up, and we'd be cut off. Waiting for IT to correct the problem was painful: a 24 hour delay, minimum.

Soon though, we discovered we could fix the problem ourselves. Throw enough characters at the terminal server, and a buffer would overflow causing it to reboot. I kept a "C" battery by my keyboard just for the purpose of weighting a key in times of Internet outage. By the time my microwave popcorn was ready, the terminal server was back up, and I could return to MUDing.

Shortly before I graduated, the school rolled out 10Base-T to the dorms. Speedy downloads and graphical web browsing were finally ours, but network outages were longer and more frustrating. Sometimes, there are advantages to crude technologies.

Why I like DSL

[jchawk]

I have DSL service at home, because it runs over the phone line which does not rely on the same source of power that my house uses, I can stay connected to the internet through power outages. I have my computers, switch and dsl modem plugged into UPS backup power supplies. . . If the power goes out, my network is still online and running.

Thankfully my internet service provider is rock solid and so is the network they operate on. My remote has had about 30 minutes of down time in the past 2 1/2 years, and it was a scheduled upgrade to the remote. :-)

Re:Use AOL? Are you nuts?

[SamSim]

Perhaps you could put them towards a worthy cause.

Re:You Know you have a problem when

[merlin_jim]

You have your ISP Service Desk on Speed Dial.

RoadRunner is on my cell phone's voice dial list. I just pick it up and say roadrunner.

I navigate the menu to get to roadrunner level 2 support by pressing
1,3,1,2,3, which means: 1 (english), 3 (existing customer / high speed internet), 1 (road runner), 2 (I do not want to refresh my converter box), 3 (the scripts for options 1 and 2, which are rebooting the modem and rebooting the computer respectively, did not solve my problem)

Needless to say, roadrunner in my area is not incredibly reliable.

Actual, more accurately, AVP2 has a documented problem with it's network stack and the Toshiba cable modem. For the curious, a NATting firewall fixed it. D-Link DI 614+ is I believe the model I got.

When Slammer first appeared...

[BigDish]

I live on a college campus with a high number of geeks. Last year when Slammer first reared its head, it brought our network to it's knees. We couldn't even do anything on the local LAN, much less get out to the Internet. It was so strange, because everyone came out of their dorm rooms and seemed bored that evening.

Re:9. Spend Time With Your Spouse?

[SMOC]

That's fucking great, from positive karma straight to terrible karma, because I post ONE funny comment (currently at +5)

Hey Taco, did you ever realize that when funny mods do not increase karma, overrated mods should not decrease it?

And the best part is, overrated does not go into metamod. Briliant. Just briliant.

I rarely notice when my DSL goes out

[swillden]

The Linux box that acts as my router is configured to automatically bring up a dialup connection if packets stop flowing over the DSL. Of course, my dialup provider is the same as my DSL provider, so it's certainly possible that both could go out at once, but it hasn't happened yet. They don't seem to be able to keep the DSL up as reliably for some reason.

Anyway, every few months or so I'll notice that my network connection is slow, and when I check the router I notice that ppp0 is up. The most common way that I notice DSL outages (which seem to happen every other month or so) is when my cellphone rings. My office phone is set up to automatically forward to my home office and then to my cell (if I don't pick up the home office line), so I notice the DSL outage by observing that my cell phone rings first, since the phone line is tied up by the dialup connection.