Death of a Router

Or...why it sometimes pays to know a little bit about networking.

So in two days it will be Thanksgiving. We're hosting most of the family, so my mom just came home with my brother in tow, on leave from Marine training at Camp Lejeune, NC SC [looks like it's remedial geography for me - gad]. Tomorrow my sister will arrive, and my other brother and his wife, who are local, will be with us on Thanksgiving as well.

So it's probably not surprising that now would not be the time I'd choose for a major home network outage. Alas, my choice was not to be. About two hours ago, my home FiOS router, an Actiontec MI424WR, shuffled off its mortal coil. It's pushing up daisies...in short, it is an ex-router.

After Verizon's automated diagnostic system quickly and efficiently determined that, yes, I had a problem that could not be automatically resolved, and after a longer than desireable wait on hold for a representative, a helpful Verizon tech got on the line and determined that indeed, they needed to send me a replacement router. Woohoo, right?

Well, except for that whole two days before Thanksgiving thing. See that means that since the shipment can't possibly go out before tomorrow morning, and Thursday is Thanksgiving, I won't see the new router until Friday at the earliest.

Now what's funny about this is that just this morning, I received my shiny new Zune 8, which I ordered...ON FRIDAY, and which shipped from halfway across the world.

So that's the bad news...looking at a two-day outage, at a time when there are both lots of folks around who might want Internet access, as well as a time when things are pretty busy at work.

Fortunately, there was a solution enabled by my being a bit of a pack rat. In my junk box, I had an old DI-624 wireless router that I figured might be able to fill the gap.

After dusting it off, I plugged it in, fired up the web admin tool (thankfully, I remembered the credentials, and a short time later was in business. Unfortunately, the model that I have only supports WEP encryption, so I had to reconfigure a couple of machines, but once that was done, all was happy.

Of course, since the Actiontec router was also responsible for splitting out the TV signal for our FiOS TV service, we'll be without TV until we get the new router. But that's pretty easy to live with, compared to being without Internet.