Doing my own production systems support

I was reminded today of why I hate to troubleshoot my own computer problems. We have had a lot of issues with our TelstraClear ISP. Easy and relatively cheap broadband access is something I took for granted back in the States. And the U.S. isn't really given high marks for universal and relatively inexpensive high speed Internet access when ranked with South Korea and other Asia Pacific nations. But compared to New Zealand I think that the U.S. fares well. Here broadband is not as ubiquitous and low cost. When I first arrived in New Zealand in June I was surprised at the dearth of free hotspots and noted that this is not the place to go wardriving looking for unencrypted access points (not that I would ever think of doing such a thing myself). Now several months later I understand fully. I don't remember running up against bandwidth limits back in New Jersey or if my Cablevision contract included them but we have easily exceeded the 4 gigs monthly that we started out with in August. With a surcharge at $5.00 per 500 meg over it can get pretty dear.

The service has not been very robust to say the least. Lucy needs the internet especially for an on line nursing exam prep course that she signed up for 2 weeks ago. Our cable modem needs to be frequently power cycled; sometimes too many times to count in a single day. Today, Saturday was particularly vexatious. I couldn't get a connection this morning and tried multiple times to reset the modem, all to no avail. It was hard to raise a support tech through the voice mail system (some things don't change regardless of what hemisphere you're in) and when I finally did, after an interminable amount of time on hold, I was told that the modem looked good on his end. I had earlier tried to isolate the problem by taking my wireless Netgear router out of the picture. That didn't work. When I tried it again at his suggestion it did. I thanked him, finished the call and then tried to put the router back into my configuration but without luck. I did succeed with Cat 5 connecting one laptop to the router but it was strange that any wireless node I set up could see the router but not get out any further. After a few hours of this I finally got to the point where my wireless devices suddenly could make internet connections. I have no understanding of what the original problem was or how it could correct itself. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I no longer do this type of stuff for a living, as I once did, and I'm glad for that. Still I'm uncomfortable with magic pixie dust solutions.