A good friend of mine, ellessar, asked me to come by his new place and hook up his internet connection. He tried himself (and called the helpdesk, which didn’t support Linksys…), but that didn’t work, so he called in the cavalry. When I arrived I started with checking the default settings, which were OK. After that I checked the cable connection which was also fine. Since this kind of ‘error’ usually is ‘user error’ I tried checking the DNS etc. (since I couldn’t use the internet, but had an IP). Nothing worked. It was saturday, after work hours, so we couldn’t call the helpdesk. I jotted down some notes, and told him to call the helpdesk the next week.

After a few days I talked to him on MSN, what… he had internet! I asked him what happened. He told me, he called the helpdesk and they tried to ship him off (for about the 3rd time) with the standard line “It’s your router, check your configuration”. He replied with the notes I jotted down and then the guy on the other got really quiet. “I’m going to ask a colleague, please hold” was the reply and he had to wait. When he returned he was told that he got a “bad IP” and that it would be fixed soon. A few days later ellessar finally got his internet back.