The Vineyards

Before writing about music in any form, I wish to let it be known that my current power supply is making noises stranger than usual, and at stranger times. It has been making strange noises at certain times since three weeks after it was bought, but now it seems to be heading to its end. Seventh, right? I lost count.

I promised myself to buy (probably import) a very good power supply this time. The limit has been crossed three or four clouds of smoke ago. "Another? There is probably something wrong with the current there." No, there is not. This room has the best wiring in the house - if the electric current was not good, many things would die before my power supplies. "You are putting too much stress on them!" So? I leave Asgaard on for periods of up to 60 days at once, is that what is wrong? "Yes! No one should do that!" I know many people who do, and they never have this problem - let alone have this problem seven times. "But they live in the United States!" Yes, they do. You mean living in the Uncivilized Lands denies me the right to keep my computer on? I do not accept that.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." You do not suppose I will just sink into the mud with the rest of the country, do you?

Speaking of sinking into the mud...

A long time ago I bought an Ethernet switch, to see if I could plug both Asgaard and Olympus directly into the ADSL modem and stop using Connection Sharing. I spent an afternoon recrimping cables to get the plugs right, and eventually came to a working scheme. But it did not work. It would only accept one computer connected each time. Because Telefónica de España does not allow me to use the connection on more than one computer. The only choice was to use a router, or another computer serving as one. Too much trouble.

Recently I found out that my ugly old ADSL modem, a Parks Prestige 632R, has routing capabilities. I studied the setup carefully, read line by line how to do it, made sure I understood each step. When I was absolutely sure it would work, I decided to move from theory to practice. And it did not work.

As I changed the modem's setup, it became inaccessible by Telnet. Apparently, one thing I did not at all consider had been done to it - Telefónica added a filter to its internal firewall preventing access to any IP that was not the original set up one. I never could imagine such a devious trap. I tried all things I could think about, but came to the conclusion I needed another way in - I needed a serial cable and a specific Parks program. I had neither. I called tech support. "A technician will be sent within 48 hours." I know. I heard that about ten times this year already. "Can you put an 'Urgency' tag in it?" "Okay, I will do it." I am becoming very knowledgeable on the workings of Telefónica's tech support. "With some luck, he should be there within 24 hours. But no guarantees."

Indeed, he was. Next morning, about 9h30am, a technician was here. The least friendly tech guy I have ever had the displeasure of receiving. He said he was from Telefónica - and nothing else. Walked in, tested the line, went for the modem. "I changed some internal configurations to make it a router, but something seems wrong." No response. He connected it to his Compaq laptop, tried to log in; no avail.

"I changed the password, too." All he needed to do was ask me for it, log in, change the setup back (I have a copy of the original setup), and go away. He could had let me do it, if he wanted - all I really needed was a way into the modem. But when I said I had changed the password, he immediately gave up and replaced the modem's firmware along with every bit of information in its ROM. He reconfigured the IP settings to what they were - ie, non routing, and put the cables back in place. The modem led said "connected at 10 Mbit".

"It is at 10. It should be 100. It was 100 before."
"That is because the Ethernet card is faulty."

Ah, of course. Let us reconfigure the network in Windows, then, because I changed lots of settings in my attempts to reach the modem.

"It will not retrieve its IP automatically?"
"No. I will set it manually."

But DHCP auto-update was working perfectly before. He set it up manually. Launched Internet Explorer, got completely, absolutely lost because there were no URLs on the location bar history. I told him to click the huge "Google" button in my links toolbar. It worked.

He picked up the phone and called the central. They took generations to respond, and another era between each question answered. His complaints about it represent more than 3/4 of the words he said while here.

Modem at 10 Mbit, DHCP not working, and my switch still useless because the modem is not properly configured ("We do not make this kind of change, and the user is not supposed to."). He walked out.

A reboot and resync fixed the 10 Mbit and DHCP problems, as I knew it would. But why did he dare say my card was faulty, and my auto-configuration was a lost cause?

Ah, yes, I live in Brazil, the Uncivilized Lands. I am not supposed to expect things to work as they should and services to be any good.

Sorry about that, my mistake.

Posted by Etienne at April 29, 2004 12:41 AM