Networking Headaches

Just spent several days and an obscene number of hours trying to get my home network back working normally. Everything deteriorated when I installed Windows XP service pack II upgrade on all three computers in my home. This is supposed to be more secure by virtue of a built-in firewall as well as several improvements to the IE browser, among other things. It also cleans up and integrates dozens of earlier hotfixes.

Of course, after I spend several hours per machine backing up files and installing and configuring the upgrade, no one in my family could log onto the internet for more than ten minutes before they were booted off. They either had to log off and log on again or restart their machine, or recycle the router. You can imagine the bitching I was getting. I almost started to feel empathy for the IT people in my last company. Almost.

Anyway, after three intense days of trying everything I could think of including spending many hours online with the tech support people in India, I finally tried disconnecting an older Belkin switch that worked fine before the upgrade. Viola' problem solved. After everything started working again and the pressure was finally off, I quietly took the old Belkin switch outside and unceremoniously flattened it with a 25lb sledge. For some reason I didn't recoup all the wasted hours by doing that, but it felt good.

Now that I am in a more reflective mood, I am thinking about how vulnerable we all are when we lose internet connectivity. My wife and I both run our businesses from home and my daughter is enrolled in online college classes. We also each keep in touch with friends and relatives via e-mail. It was only a couple years ago that we had a dialup connection and only one person could be online at a time and it was so tedious that no one spent very much time there.

Now it has become an integral part of our lives and when it crashes, the impact is felt immediately. Setting up a home network can be relatively easy if you have fairly new machines and they all have the same operating system, which is likely. Fixing it when it crashes is not easy. The software built into Windows is almost no help.

I consider myself to be fairly literate when it comes to computers, less so with networking. I wonder how many people in LA are on the phone with their ISP or their network hardware Technical Service people right this minute tearing their hair out. I'll bet the number of people increases significantly every day.....