Weekend from hell

For those who don't know this, my "weekends" happen in the middle of the week.

Between my neighbur, and myself, we have six computers set up on a network that spans between two houses, connected via a wireless bridge.

I got home from work Monday night to find that my internet, and email was no longer functioning. I reset a couple of pieces of equipment, and got it back - untill late Monday night, when it went down and stayed there.

Tuesday morning, still had everything down, and the computers were all refusing to acknowlege the IP addresses they were supposed to be set to. Basic equipment checks indicated that everything was supposed to be working normally. After failing to find the cause to this problem, I called out a "professional." Well, the "professional" just checked everything that I did, and couldn't figure out the problem either. By this time, the neighbour was up, and had come over, as I had called him to see what he could see on his end. Everything was dead over there as well. After the "tech" gave up and left, we kept plugging away at the problem.

I finally got frustrated with the automatic setup part of winblows, and forced everything on my side of the house on fixed addresses. Cool, that fixed the blindness at my house. Unfortunately, I still couldn't see the other side. Off we go to the neighbours house to check out the troubles on their end. The internet server that we were using seemed to have pulled itself off of the network. We couldn't see it, nor was it continuing to assign IP addresses.

Back up to my house to grab another PC that I'd built out of a collection of spare parts. We then set it up as a new server in the name of a rapid restoral without having to troubleshoot what quit. It was a problematic PC anyway.

We finally get the internet back - briefly. Nature decides to have her fun, and dumps a massive storm on us, cutting off the satellite system due to rain fade. When the storm clears, the system does not reset. :cussing:

A software reinstallation later, we get the internet back - at the server. The rest of the PC's at the neighbours house still refuse to access it. More swearing, and more address reassigning later, we finally get the network and internet functional at the neighbours house. We still cannot communicate between the two houses. By now, it's late, and I'm too frazzled to think, so we call it a night.

Wednesday morning, I head off to Fry's to purchase a replacement access point. My AP is forced to sit outside in order to link to the other house, so it gets exposed to weather, despite being sheltered by the carport roof.

I get home to find that Linksys has once again redesigned the AP, and cannot use the same cabling that the one it's to replace used to get set up. Additionally, the PC that I was using to set this thing up, was refusing to acknowledge the existance of the new router. I go to a different PC, and can get it to see the router, so I continue on from there. Unfortunately, as this PC uses a TV as a monitor, by the time I get the text large enough to read on the manual for setup, I can no longer navigate the online manual. I decide to print it. The manual has errors, and the printer refuses the job, and pulls ITSELF off of the network. :cussing:

I get the printer reinstalled, but it still will not print the manual. It prints anything else just fine. :roll: By now, I'm too mad to think clearly - break time. I go down to the neighbours house to calm down, and see how they're doing. Well, once again, the internet has taken itself completely offline. He was working on that problem again, and his wife was doing her online stuff via dialup. After another half hour of fighting with the satellite system, the net is back up once again.

We then head back over to my place to figure out how to get the AP set up as a bridge. I grab the CD, and move to the original PC that balked at installing the AP, and pulled up the manual there. Finally getting the thing figured out, we get the box set up and ready to go. Now back down to the neighbours house, to get his side reassigned to talk to the new AP.

We reassign his PC to the required address, and get his box set up. Upon restoring the old defaults, his PC will not recognize ANY computer at all. Oddly though, it still sees the net. We rechecked all settings repeatedly, and verified they were correct. We then end up calling Microsoft to figure out what the malfunction was this time. It turned out that his PC had decided to self uninstall a client share setting. Restoring that brought the PC back to the network. For the first time in two days, the entire network is up and running with all PC's visible.

We go to head back up to my place to check access there, when I get this hunch - check out his wife's PC to verify internet. It's down AGAIN!! :cussing: :cussing:

Back once again to the server, and access is down on it as well. Now he's on the phone to direcway to figure out what's going on this time. Direcway ends up having him reinstall their software - again, and they download all new sofware to redo the install one more time. While they're donig this, I head up to the house to deal with other unrelated activities that I was keeping up with during stops in working on our little outage. About the time I'm headed back to his house, I get a call, to check my email to see if it's working. It finally is, for the first time since Monday night. The time on this was right at 6:00pm. The satellite internet is also finally acting like the broadband system that it is supposed to be as well - for the first time since they bought the equipment almost two years ago.

After this mess, I will no longer complain about the time that it takes for the people here at work to restore the systems when they go haywire. I've never had a more frustrating time keeping PC's up and functional as my neighbour and I did over these last two days. I hope that these systems stay up for a long time as well. I'm not too sure that I will be sucessful in restraining my urge to grab the 25 pound sledgehammer and using it on these computers if they break again anytime soon. :crazyeyes:

 

:rofl: :lolup: :jester: :silly:

 

Dave, if it wasn't for the sheer amount of money I have tied up in all of this stuff, I would have. :cussing: Every time I felt the urge to kick one of these computers across the house, I thought of what it was going to cost to replace it. Right now, I just don't have the extra cash.

 

I'm pretty much at that point now. Unfortunately, the monstrosity has been built. All this started with wanting a weather station to relay it's information onto a PC, and then the internet. I wanted it to be dedicated, so I built an older, and very simple system.

As I used to build PC's for a living way back when, I've still held the desire to built the "ultimate" machine. That machine is in my office as well. When I bought this house, I was entertaining the idea of incorportating a PC into the entertainment system. So, when I had the ruined drywall off of the walls, I prewired the place before putting up the new stuff. About a year later, the multimedia PC was built and added to the network. Internet, games, music, and TV were all combined into one cool little package displayed through an ultra fancy ATI video card, and displayed through a 34" Sony Vega TV. 8) It'll do untill the cost of HD plasma TV's come down out of orbit.

Then my neighbours purchase the equipment for satellite broadband internet service. They attempted to have a wireless USB network, which failed miserably. I helped wire their house to a 100 Base-T network, and also took a spare PC of theirs, and set it up for a dedicated internet server - complete with the instructions to never touch it unless it died.

Putting all this together, we got this bright idea to network the two houses together. Then I could get broadband internet, and help pay for the monthly cost of the service. So, we ended up with a wireless bridge between the two houses, since the distance between our places is too far apart to run a cable between them. Thusly, we have six PC's connected via wired networks, which are tied together via an "invisible" cable.

Most of the time, it works well. In the past, when something did fail, the cause was easily found and the offending item replaced. This last outage was the absolute worst one we've ever had. I'm praying that it was an example of the worst case scenario.

 

The original connectivity issue was due to the wireless access point. Due to the limitations on where we could set up our AP's where they could link up to each other, this forces my stuff to be outside. Even though it's under cover, and not being immediately inundated by inclimate weather, it's still subject to temperature extremes, and condensation. I actually expect to have to replace mine annually.

The internet host PC has always been flaky. It was always very slow to boot, but seemed to run ok once loaded up. A while back, it "went dark" in terms of being accessable from other PC's yet still seemed to work ok in performing it's intended purpose. We simply let this problem exist far too long.

These two pieces of equipment were the primary problems. The matter of getting everything back to doing what it was supposed to do, seemed to be the main source of frustration once the offending items were replaced. Direcway's equipment getting stubborn on us during this time only added addtional fuel to the fire. As it is, the PC in my office still refuses to get on the net. I don't know why, as it is set up identically to every one of the other PC's on the network. There is some kind of device conflict in this machine, that winblows refuses to let me correct. It's solution will be a system kill and reinstall from scratch. It'll take me half a day to get everything back on the machine, so I'll just have to wait untill I find the time - someday.

 

The direcway equipment is software driven, and connected via USB ports. Their equipment is also not network compatible. This requires having it connected to a computer, instead of directly to an ethernet port like cable modems or DSL. My neighbour is also constantly messing with his PC, so we went the server route to keep the problems related to his constant tinkering to a minimum. In that regard, this setup has worked nicely.

 

Yes, they are now. They want a small fortune for it though. Once the prices get reasonable, we'll look into this change.

 

I'll pass this on to my neighbour, who owns the equipment.