Thursday, October 16, 2008

Stupid hotel room tricks

I cursed my hotel for a good five minutes while I tried to figure out what was wrong with their ethernet connection.  I could ping carnage blender's server, the only IP I knew without DNS working, but nothing else worked.  I was sure that it was one of the standard "we'll redirect all traffict to our own server until you agree to our terms of service" things but I couldn't get it to work.  I've seen some that are broken on non-mainstream browsers but even Firefox was baffled.

It hurt my geek pride, but I finally called tech support.  "Is there anything between the computer and the ethernet port in the wall?"  Yes, my cat5 cable ran to the desk, which had another cable running to the wall.  "Try plugging your machine directly into the wall."  And magically everything worked.

Moral: sometimes it really is a hardware problem.

3 comments:

abby said...

Didn't Grant do tech support on hotel internet connections? You could have called him. :)

Unknown said...

funny, that would be about the only solution I could have proposed.

This reminds me of Aesop fables

Grant Ellis said...

As a note, "plug directly into the wall" is one of the first things we tried. :)