Mediacom

Today was frustrating. I woke up this morning with absolutely no Internet connectivity, and traced the issue down to a very odd set of symptoms. Every protocol except DNS worked; and any port 53 traffic was denied. I could connect numerically, but not by name. If I tunnelled DNS through our VPN to the office, that worked! Like a fool, I didn't accept that - I called Mediacom. After a while on the phone with a helpful tech, I was told that it was new modem time. Ok... then Rick tells me that he's having problems, too, and that Mediacom told him that they had done an upgrade last night and there were some problems around Columbia.

So, I went and got a new modem (and fixed Rick's network). Plugged it in, received WalledGarden (their modem registration system), registered - and boom, nothing at all. Not even a private IP address. I spent 19 minutes on hold, and another 30 talking to a tech before discovering that the problem was that walledgarden registered my system wrongly - it detected the wrong modem MAC address. How does that happen??? Anyway, it works now. I haven't managed to do any work today at all, so I'm in for a virtual evening in the office.

Cingular 8525 Synchronization

I'm the proud owner of a Cingular 8525 phone/pocket PC. Overall, I like it a lot - but I've had a terrible time with getting it to synch. Under Vista (from which I have now thankfully escaped), it sort-of worked... sometimes. Under XP, I made the mistake of installing ActiveSync 4.5 - and nothing worked at all. Eventually, I found the key to removing 4.5 and putting 4.2 back on: when the device is connected, go into Device Manager, find the device and uninstall the driver. Then reboot, and finally reinstall ActiveSync.

Pain in the rear, but it worked really well.