Haha, router go "bzzt"!

So, we've been having summer storms lately, some of which are related to hurricanes and tropical storms, some just summer weather. On Saturday, we had a close strike. I was in the bedroom on my eeePC, playing dcss, and my wife was doing video editing on the desktop/server in the study. I saw a lightning flash, heard a loud "POP", and then heard the thunder immediately after.

No one was hurt, and thankfully none of the computers was fried. But the cable modem was absolutely fried – it wouldn't power on. So, fearing that it would take several days to get a technician to deliver a new modem, I drove with my youngest to the cable company office, which thankfully is not far away. Masks on, we stood in line outside the office, socially-distanced waiting spots taped on the outside wall. There were lots of people in line, and it was raining lightly. Eventually, we traded out the fried modem for a new one.

After getting home and plugging it in, I discovered that the router/WiFi AP was also broken, just not as obviously. It powered up, and it was possible to connect to its WiFi network, but it wouldn't talk to its uplink, and kept cycling the LEDs in what must have been some kind of error code that I was never able to find on the company's website. After a few tries at factory resetting it didn't accomplish anything, I went out to buy a new router, at the office store that's about a block away from the cable company office I had just left.

I ended up getting the next newer version of the same router I had before. It has 4 antennas instead of 3, and 802.11ax instead of 802.11ac, which I guess is nice. The main improvement over the other one as far as I'm concerned is that it supports forwarding more ports to my server than the old one. I had intended to put DD-WRT on the old one to overcome that issue, but never got around to it.

It's been a bit of a hassle getting all of my services forwarded, because I didn't document them well for myself. I messed up the mosh UDP forwarding ports, and I forgot to forward the XMPP-over-https port, which meant file transfers from Conversations on our phones weren't working.

I think everything is finally back to normal, though. The little bit of sysadmin time inspired me to install Jellyfin, which is kind of awesome.

Jellyfin

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup