Re: [LUG] Router question

On 22 October 2013 10:42, Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The issue with fiddling like this is that unless you're meticulous to change just one thing at a time and run checks before and after, you might as well be part of the "have you tried turning it off and on again" brigade.

I take mild, eyebrow-raising issue with that. The number of times this works is astonishing, and the amount of time saved in diagnosis for trivial problems is significant if it's the first thing you do with any random piece of misbehaving machinery. (And not just in computers - I did it with an errant water pump yesterday. Saved me a couple of hours and getting covered in mud, and probably gave me just as much insight into why it had stopped pumping)

In routers and modems, it's a quick and simple fix for a whole host of problems, some of which are not fixable without manufacturer firmware updates or replacing the whole router (I'm thinking of some of the draytek memory leaks in particular here - even though I suspect that's what the issue is, I'm not going to throw away a £180 router when it just needs turning off and on again every few weeks!). ADSL in particular appears to have a huge amount of variables - the line quality being just one, and filters, and local line quality, extraneous noise - before you even start considering bugs in the firmware of the modem, of which there are legion. That it's not black and white is evidenced by, again in Draytek's case, them supplying several different types of firmware to cope with poor quality/good quality lines.

With more complicated things like PC's, especially windows ones... Nobody can be expected to instantly know why something isn't working right, be it a printer not being detected, a flash drive not being picked up properly, mysterious freezes or crashing of programs. You can, and I have, spend many days trying to diagnose it, going down a dozen dead-ends in fault-finding, when all you really need to do is reboot it and make a cup of tea.

Pragmatism. It has a place in workload/life balance.

And frankly, when you consider how much can go wrong, it's a ruddy miracle these things ever work!