This is dedication for you. It’ two thirty ay-em, and I’m writing to tell you why I’m not writing.
This is a followup to the Bad Hardware thing which – in case you didn’t listen to it – dealt with my buying a Soundblaster Extigy Coollness In Hardware Form box’o’tricks. Then taking it back because it didn’t like my USB port.
I replaced it with a SBLive 5.1. Now, if we put the Extigy on the “Matrix” level of cinematic coolness, the Live 5.1 is somewhere about “Pulp Fiction” level. Still cool, but doesn’t look as nice, and is about a half-decade old now. Nevertheless, it works.
And so I plugged it in, reinstalled windows to lose the Extigy crap (My Windows install is on the setup-equivilant of wheels, so that I can wipe and reinstall windows with the minimum of fucking around with repairing world) Installed Win2k services packs One! Two! Three! Ahh-ah-ah</muppet>, then the critical updates, and finally the misc drivers for graphics, sound etc.
Then rebooted.
Windows had, in it’s infinate wisdom, found my network card.
This was something of a suprise, since it had been using said network card to download and install the critical updates. This was also a shock because as long as I’ve been using Windows 2000, it’s detected my network card as something that it isn’t. It’s never given me any trouble, however, so I let it be.
Now it was saying how it had found an SMC 1211tx and was installing the drivers. Yay, thought I, it got it right for once. I’ll see if there are any newer drivers for it.
Open Mozilla.
“Cannot open http://reef.water.gkhs.net/~aquarion/, No route to host”
Umm.
“Cannot open http://www.google.com, No route to host”
Uh oh. Start SSH session…
“Unable to open a connection to reef, host does not exist.”
Ping reef
C:>ping 10.1.0.2
Pinging 10.1.0.2 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 10.1.0.5:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms
Oh.
Bugger.
Maelstrom, my desktop, was no longer connected to the network. it wasn’t even asking for DHCP packets on startup. No amount of reinstalling windows, drivers, hardware or brains has helped. For a while this evening I was convinced it was the SBLive’s fault, because it now had also stopped working, and both it and the Network card were being detected as existing without being able to find drivers.
This was eventually diagnosed as a USB jumper having fallen off. The soundcard works fine now. Everything is hippity hoppity dine and fandy.
Except I can’t access the network, where all my files are, or the internet, where the rest of the world is.
So lack of entries.