DSL troubles and other computer stuff

I was at work on Monday when I noticed my SSH connection home kept dying. It’d be up for a few minutes then suddenly timeout and I would have to reconnect. It was aggravating as hell, but I figured it was just a problem with the DSL bridge and I’d solve it by power cycling the thing which would obviously have to wait until I got home.

So I toughed it out a few more hours, got home and power cycled it. That’s the only control you’ve got over the box. It synced back up after a few moments but pretty soon after, I saw the “DSL” light went out and all my connections to the outside world died again. It would sync back up, stay up for several minutes, then freak out again. Repeat.

After an hour or two of this junk, I called up Speakeasy (my ISP). I’m paying entirely too much for this DSL to have such problems with it. I quickly got to a real person since their support is pretty good and explained the situation. We ran a few quick tests, he called Covad, and came up with the answer that there’s false termination somewhere on my line. This means there’s a problem somewhere before the end of my 9000’ loop length. He said I wouldn’t hear anything back until Monday, since it was now the weekend. Great.

Saturday was especially tough. I was trying to talk to Sarah (who’s currently out of the country, so AIM and email is all we’ve got) and it kept freaking out. My mouse almost met an unceremonious end, but narrowly avoided death. It didn’t freak out too bad on Sunday at all which was kind of weird. It seemed to only be freaking out at peak times of the day.

I was a little nervous about what they would find today. I was worried they’d discover that I was now just screwed because of something the ILEC did and my only recourse would be getting their crappy special DSL. Well I got a call from Verizon followed by one from Speakeasy and it looks like they somehow magically fixed the problem. My last outage was at 11:09am which was before I got either call. So I guess I didn’t really need to worry nor did I need to freak out and destroy things.

Speaking of computer junk, it’s about time for some changes around here. I’ve got a new hard drive for ziggy and I’m thinking it’s time to switch over to a new operating system on there since I have to do a reinstall too. I’ve been wondering whether I want to install Fedora or RHEL. I work on both. It’s just a matter of what I really want to do here. I’m looking to replace monolith (my rather out of date, hot, noisy, and underpowered workstation) with something slightly newer. If that works out, I’ll be sending the old monolith off to someone who can make much better use of it. I might even be able to get a new laptop from work to replace my old Vaio if I’m lucky.

And speaking of which, I am very much looking forward to next Thursday when Sarah gets back into this country and I’m able to call her again. I just need to think of enough things to do to keep me busy between now and then.