Due to a heavy storm this weekend, the power was out in my San Francisco neighborhood for much of the day today.

Luckily, thanks to a battery backup system, I didn't lose any documents I was working on on my computer, but after the third outage recovery of the day, I found I was no longer able to connect to the Internet. Grrr! So of course, the first thing I thought to do was to go to support.earthlink.net and check for the status of their network. Oops... d'oh, no Internet! So I realized, of course, that I'd actually have to *call* Earthlink to get information on their network status, and I fired up Firefox to do a search for "Earthlink 800 number" and... d'oh again! Damn, it's amazing how second nature Internet info lookups are!

Anyway, lame admissions aside, I figured I could share with you the resolution that could ultimately save YOU a lot of time in the future!As it turns out, after waiting quite a bit on hold, I found out that there WAS no Earthlink network outage.

Now of course, as any self-respecting geek, I had already tried the whole power-cycling bit (turning off the modem & router & computer, turning them back on, blah blah blah, to no avail).

But when the Earthlink rep suggested that I try hooking up my DSL modem directly to the computer (bypassing my wireless router), that's when I had an ah-ha moment!

Duh, it's the router!
I discovered that, lo and behold, I *could* connect to the Internet directly. Whew!

Okay, so then what?
First, I worried about a worst case scenario: was my router fried? It wasn't just an issue of me being able to lazily surf the Web from my couch using my laptop; my roommate depended upon my wireless connection for her work using her own laptop, so I HAD to get this working.

I stuck a pin in the reset slot, but still no Internet juice.

That's when it finally dawned on me...

Somehow my router's config had reverted back to the factory default
So, after more than an hour of agonizing and troubleshooting (cables all tight? Modem working? etc...), I finally solved the problem in 3 minutes by simply re-adding my Earthlink info into my router's config screens, and -- voila -- blissfully connected once again!

* * *

Anyway, I decided to blog about this tale not to highlight the cracks in my geek cred, but rather to help others whose routers might in the future get reset due to a power spike or other related issue following a power outage.

Love this Tag this Share this entry! :) [ What the heck?! ]

Del.icio.us

Digg

Furl

Spurl

Slashdot