Troubleshooting home networks, and citizen equality.

View 772 Friday, May 03, 2013

A long time ago when computers were not very reliable, and networking them was tricky at best, I developed a principle of troubleshooting: ninety percent of the time it’s a cable. This morning Roberta’s computer told her she wasn’t connected to a network. It had a box to click for fixing the problem. She hadn’t encountered that message before, and rather than respond to it told me.

I had a quick look, and it was in fact the Microsoft Windows message, and she was in fact not connected to our internal network. I looked at the Ethernet switch for her system, and the power on light was lit but nothing was blinking. I found a spare D-Link gigabit switch, but no power supply for it; I tried it with the old power supply, the power on light came on, but when I connected the cables to the printer and to the main Ethernet switch upstairs, nothing happened.

I went back to finish my coffee, then took a working gigabyte switch from the Apple Net Book Pro I used for Skype and Internet conferencing, along with its power supply, and went downstairs and connected that switch to Roberta’s system. This time I got some lights blinking but the connection wasn’t reliable, at which point I remembered Pournelle’s first principle of troubleshooting and replaced the cable from her system to the switch box. Lo!, all was well. She’s connected back to the system, and all is well.

Meanwhile upstairs I tried to get the switch I’d replaced to work with the Mac Book Pro, and it didn’t work well at all: light on but no blinking lights. Yet that certainly had been working before I changed switches. And in fact the Pro was connected to the net. Now what? But of course that’s simple. The Pro, formerly connected through the Ethernet, found itself disconnected from the net and connected through the Airport wireless; once connected it saw no need to connect through the Ethernet again.

Of course I can’t leave it alone. Now I have been trying to get the D-Link DGS 2205 Gigabit Switch, which also has a printed label “green Ethernet” on it, to work. It’s clearly new switch, probably one bought for me by Eric when we used the switch connecting Robert’s system to the network, as the entry point for TRENDnet 500 Mbps Compact Powerline AV Adapters which use the house power lines to connect to the back room where my TV set, which has TV input Cable but no Internet, resides. Getting an Ethernet line back there has been a problem for years, and the TRENDnet devices work so I can now use the Internet to find content for my TV. More on that another time.

But the “green Ethernet” D-link switch doesn’t seem to want to work, making me wonder whether it was a bad cable after all? In any event her system works, and all is well. And home networks still take troubleshooting.

My problem is, why do my older D-Link switches work just fine, but the newer “green Ethernet” switch doesn’t – any why did it suddenly stop working after weeks of doing everything well? I’ll figure it out.

I’ve now heard the Reese Witherspoon arrest tape, and it’s pretty clear that Atlanta would be far better off without that particular police officer. When I grew up, the police were the friends of the citizens. They weren’t looking for reasons to make arrests, they were supposed to keep the peace. When I was growing up our local deputy sheriff would have been more interested in preventing Witherspoon’s husband from driving drunk than in arresting a pushy blonde. This one was determined to make certain that Witherspoon and husband were subjects, not citizens.

The parts of the arrest audio being broadcast make the policemen sound more reasonable than he was; you have to listen to it all, otherwise it makes is sound as if she’s just a pushy blonde. Which she was, but that’s not illegal. The policeman was insisting that she get back in her car, as if she were some kind of danger to him, which again it is clear she was not. Of course we can think of similar situations which would have looked like a danger to the policemen. This wasn’t one of them.

This is a result of the crazy insistence on equality. If everyone has to be treated equally, then everyone has to be treated as a potential cop-killer contemptuous of the police and the society; and of course if everyone is treated that way, more and more will find that they may as well be hung for being a sheep instead of a lamb, and a few will figure out that if they act as wolves they may well not be hung at all.

I don’t know of a real solution to this problem. I do know where it ends. Social orders have been down that road before.

Freedom is not free.  Free men are not equal.  Equal men are not free. And having said all that, we do not know how to deal with real inequalities – of civility, of ability, of moral value – among citizens. We don’t really even have a theory.

Gelzinis: The deadly sound silence can make,

Jerry

When the lawyers start whining about how unfair it is to prosecute the Boston bombers’ friends – the ones who went into the apartment and tried to throw evidence away – one should consider this piece:

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/peter_gelzinis/2013/05/gelzinis_the_deadly_sound_silence_can_make

Sobering.

Ed