Well That Was Fun
It turns out that there are two circuit breakers for the wall outlets in the kitchen. One of them has the microwave, toaster oven and DSL modem on it, we learned today. Oops.
It was deja vu back to Quincy, when the entire apartment was on two circuit breakers, and the microwave could not be run at the same time as the toaster oven or, well, much else, so I had it plugged in via the living room to the other circuit.
Deb was making stuff in both cooking venues at once and they died. At first we though that ohmygod the microwave had decided to die the very same day I hooked up the replacement DVD player Deb’s father sent us (woohoo, thanks!). Nope. Just a circuit breaker tied to disparate outlets.
Then the interwebs were down…
Oops, the DSL modem plugs in under the kitchen table, apparently on the same circuit. Doh. So I did all the normal troubleshooting. I rebooted the modem, the router, the computers. I shut them all down in correct order and brought them back up carefully. I flushed the DNS cache with ipconfig. I checked the router settings. I eventually used Verizon’s diagnostic tools and they told me to call.
Spent almost half an hour on the phone with a pleasant young man of modest technical skill but lots of company resources and English easily understood through his Indian accent. He made sure I knew about FiOS being available here, as expected. We had decided we’d wait to try the fiber optic; let it get better established.
The trick was to reset the DSL modem, not reset as in reboot, but as in using the little recessed button that returns the unit to factory settings. We logged onto it, gave it user and password info and basically I was online with no further fuss.
I still have to return to using the router so Deb’s computer has the world wide interwebnets too, but what a relief to be back online and not have to replace the modem. Yay.
sheesh. Good thing it was a reasonably easy fix.
Posted by caltechgirl on 05/02 at 04:29 PM
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