Do something! Do something! Do something NOW! That was the refrain Berta was hearing from the renters one weekend morning. Berta is the employee in charge of a rental property and the best cook and housekeeper in San Miguel de Allende. Her technical expertise does not extend very far into network topology or internet troubleshooting though. Berta tries hard to please, sometimes too hard, so with the tenants vociferously wailing that they were being deprived of Facebook, she succumbed to the pressure of the moment.
To keep tenants from fooling with the computer network, the modem, wireless access points and router are all under lock and key at this rental house, but Berta has the keys and this time she let herself be browbeaten into using them. The tenants said they “just looked” at the equipment, but when I arrived I could tell that “just looking” also included switching Ethernet cables from place to place and pressing all the reset buttons. It took me an hour to straighten out the mess they made.
The fact is that if the tenants had just left everything well enough alone, the internet connectivity would most likely have returned to normal in fairly short order without any intervention on their part. Interruptions of internet connectivity may occur for many different reasons. When outages result from conditions in the equipment of the Internet Service Provider, these problems usually self-correct. It is somewhat less common to have a problem in your Local Area Network (LAN) inside your house.So what should you do when you realize you no longer have any access to the internet?
The first question to ask is what did you just change that might have caused the internet outage? Did you unplug something? Did you install some new software? Did you just bring some new wireless device into the house? If the answer is no, then the outage is probably not at your house and also it is probably just temporary. You should not do anything in haste. Go take a walk or have a cup of coffee because when you get back your service might be back also.
If your service has not been restored in a reasonable period of time, you can next try to turn off everything on your LAN. Turn off all computers (this means off, not sleep), turn off tablets, turn completely off or remove batteries from smart phones, and unplug the power cord (only the power cord) from your modem, wireless routers, etc. Once everything is off, plug in the modem first, wait two minutes. Plug in your wireless router if you have one, then turn on one computer only. If that restores your internet connectivity to that one computer then you may proceed to turn on all your other devices. If not, then turn off everything again and this time leave everything off for fifteen minutes before turning back on. If that also fails then you will most likely need more experienced technical help.
There are a couple of things you do not want to do right away: You should not start unplugging any Ethernet cables because these were already in the correct locations. These cables were in the correct places when the internet worked, so moving them elsewhere is not going fix anything.
You should never press the reset button on any of your network equipment! If you have only one piece of network hardware you may be able to get away with this, but if you have multiple devices configured on the same LAN you had better not push that button. In most cases all this does is set the equipment back to factory defaults and guarantee that your internet will never come back until a technician comes to fix what you broke by pressing that button.
In the final analysis, the element that fixes many internet outages is something in very short supply now days: patience.
Occasional Reporter contributor Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with more than 20 years IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted through his web site at SMAguru.com.