For the last week and a half, my family has not had Internet access at home. It’s my fault.

I’m the family network and pc support technician. When our wireless Internet access went down while I was in Anchorage, it stayed down until I got home. And then it stayed down several days longer while I worked on it.

It’s frustrating to shift over from a full day’s work – often on technical problems – to an evening of fighting technical problems at home. And I’m not very good at technical troubleshooting to begin with, I get too cranky and snappy.

Anyway, when I returned home from Anchorage a week ago, we had no Internet access at all, even direct wired into our cable modem. I called Comcast – whose new call center phone system sucks! – and they helpfully told me that my cable modem was set to standby, blocking access. The button probably got pushed while the family was trying to reset the cable modem in my absence (the primary suggestion I gave them).

At that point, I was able to connect directly from my computer to the Internet. Step 1! Yeah! But I was not able to connect my wireless router to the Internet. I set that up, but the router couldn’t talk to the Internet at all.

I replaced my router. I didn’t want to drive all the way to Silverdale in construction traffic, and Walmart’s options were a Linksys WR54G, which has known issues connecting to Macs, and a Belkin, which is probably nice enough technology but typically is about my fourth choice.

I got the Belkin, and the install system wouldn’t work on my Mac. I was able to configure it manually, and same problem – the router itself wouldn’t connect to the Internet. No amount of rebooting corrected the problem.

Comcast (and their sucky phone system) was no help. They could see live signal to my network, and so declared it working fine.

I trekked to Silverdale and picked up a router I am confident of – a D-Link Rangebooster G. The next day I connected it, and voila – it spoke to the Internet! And the Internet talked back! I was able to get my husband and son’s computers connected to it. My husband’s comment: “Holy crap, it’s the Internet!” (He hadn’t been able to use it for ten days.)

My Mac was being typically stubborn about wireless. It would connect via cable, but not wireless. Macs are a bit of a pain to work on, there are three places you can go to troubleshoot wireless – basic Internet connect, system network settings, and application network utilities. Buried in network settings I found a cached static IP setting. I removed that, restarted my wireless connection, and it worked on wireless too!

I tightened down security, interrupting my husband’s Homestar Runner session. I encrypted via WEP, added Mac address filtering and hid the router ID broadcast. This was all one step at a time, in case any particular setting blew up the ability to connect, but all went well. (Yes, I know WPA is more secure, but my Mac is notably persnickety about connecting to a WPA-secured router.)

I am so glad to have solid wireless restored throughout my house, and so is my family. I never realized how annoying it would be to have to go connect directly any time I needed anything. Plus, I was paranoid about security and virus issues with the direct connection!

I think the crew is properly grateful. ☺