Common Misconceptions

Well, spent most of the day without the internet. I had suspicions regarding my router and modem. But I only just managed to fix it about 30 minutes ago. What was the error? It wasn't a simple case of manually rebooting every router, modem or computer connected to the network. No, it wasn't that simple or I would have had it up and running 5 minutes from the point of breakdown.

Instead I spent a solid hour doing physical checking and hard reboots. Strangely enough, I decided to live the day without the internet. Sounds hard, but it's actually quite easy. So I spent the whole day doing without the internet. Read up some interesting research papers and after that I watched CSI Supreme Sunday on AXN. After that it was already 12.30am. I decided to give Starhub a call and they said that all their tech support guys were busy and they'd call me back tomorrow.

Normally I wouldn't bother continuing fixing the problem with the internet. But my mom decided to try and inject some of her words of wisdom while I was on the phone with Starhub and as usual she said, "Oh tell me what did they reply you! Tell them to send someone down as soon as possible!" I was of course felt that they won't send anyone down physically if they don't even know if it's a problem on my side.

So after I put down the phone, I logged into my router's control page. Yeah my router is remotely controlled via a webpage. Much like most routers now. And if it was a physical router fault, I'd know right away since I wouldn't be able to log into the control page. So back to how I solved the problem. Normally, when you hard reboot your hardware, it usually does a soft reboot as well and clears it's temporary caches and reloads everything with new values. But then I found out, that my Linksys router doesn't!

I ran a series of Tracert and ping tests to check if my computer could connect to any other network points other than my router, it came up ziltch. I was wondering if perhaps it was a network failure on Starhub's side. But I considered the fact that it wasn't on the news and dismissed it. It was then that I decided to check on my router's status page and look at the ip such as Gateway, DNS servers and WINSock servers. I discovered that they were all there. So if my router was assigned those numbers, it means the network was working! At least partially.

How did I know that? I didn't haha... until I decided to check if a soft reboot like releasing the old IP the router had and renewing it would solve the problem. Note that a typical computer will renew it's IP everytime you shut it down and restart it again. And a typical modem would do the same thing. So you would normally assume that a router would do the same thing after a hard reboot. But it seems a router's temporary storage information works on a flash rom memory and it wouldn't change the temporary information unless you change it yourself. So voi'la, manually releasing and renewing the ip did the trick.

If any of you guys run into this exact same problem in the future, you'd do well to just do a ip release and renew to avoid having nearly 17 hours of no internet. Of course if it's a hardware issue or a network issue on your ISP's side, then I do wish you the best of luck. The moral of today's story? Thinking outside of normal parameters saves the day yet again. Alauz Out!


Idiots of today, Geniuses of tomorrow