instead of sleeping...

A not-untypical view of my messy desk.

For reasons we're not gonna go into here, I installed a new router yesterday , and when I went to bed, everything was working fine. When I got up in the middle of the night to check something, the wired-network desktop computer couldn't get to the internet.

Oh, damn. What's wrong with the router?

Reboot the router. Problem persists.

Reboot the wired-in computer. Problem persists.

OK, all the devices connected by wifi are fine. Take another computer, disable the wifi, connect it via cable: works fine. So it's probably not the router.

Go back to the wired-in computer. Internet still doesn't work, so let's see if we can communicate with the router over the web-based interface.

That comes in fine. So the computer can see the router, it just can't see through the router to get to the internet.

That means that the network card in the computer is probably OK. Just because it's an easy fix, I try swapping out some cables. Problem persists. (Yeah, that probably wasn't gonna work anyway...)

Hook up the computer directly to the modem, leaving out the router. Computer still can't get to the internet, but it CAN communicate with the modem over the modem's web interface.

All right, now you're just tryin' to piss me off. You're doin' a pretty good job of it, too.

I've got a utility on the wired computer that makes a snapshot of the system files every week (it's called TimeShift), so you can roll back to a time when stuff was all working. So I go back to my last saved snapshot and install that. (Hrmph. The reset only took about two or three minutes; not as long as I'd feared.)

Reboot the computer: everything's working. Reinstall the updates that had come in during the past week (Drat! Three browsers; it's a LOTTA megabytes that we gotta get); everything's still working. Reboot after the updates; still working.

What a pain. Just a coincidence (probably) that it happened at the same time as the new router... and the detective work saved me sending the router back, getting a replacement, and having the same problem.(Although before I did that, I probably would have replaced the older router, seen that the problem persisted, and continued detective work... but I can't guarantee that, either.)

I feel both smart (for having fixed the problem) and dumb (for having planned to send back the faultless router.

Oh, well. Bike ride in a few hours. That'll help.