Got blasted...

[Jerry McBride]

Came home tonight and was greeted with... "Dad... the internet is dead"...

And indeed it was. Number one son was not able to surf for homework and number 
one wife was piss... angry that she couldn't watch reruns on FOX...

I plugged in my laptop and started simple pings to all local IP's and found I 
was able to ping "most local clients" and nothing going out the linux router 
to the internet. Hmmm... his was something very new...

Taking my dead list down stairs to the "it room"...  there was  a definite 
pattern to the failure. All dead IP's were on the same Linksys switch. I 
swapped out that Linksys switch box and all but two clients came back on line 
and access outside was restored. Hmmm a dead switch... The install date on 
the switch made it 10 years old. The dust on said switch would have made it 
much older...

A little more time with the two dead clients turned up two dead, on board 
ethernet interfaces!  Grab two new Dlink nicks from my travel kit, recompile 
kernels for new hardware support and both clients back up and running

Yipes... we got hit hard, but the question is, "from where"?

How does an 8port switch and two onboard Nic's get toasted and nothing else is 
touched? Amazing. I'll be picking up a new backup switch and a couple of PCI 
NIC's tomorrow to replentish my backup supply. Hmmm... maybe now is a good 
time to look into giga bit upgrade for the house... gotta' talk o the wife 
some more...

Gee... this seems just like work.... but I love it.

Cheers all.




-- 

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                             From the desk of:
                             Jerome D. McBride
                                       
        19:01:36 up  1:05,  5 users,  load average: 0.35, 0.13, 0.04
 
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