Convalesco

Until last year, I was using as a DSL modem/router an old Speedtouch 530. The problem with this router was that it didn’t had an automatic function to reconnect to the internet when the connection, for whatever reason, went down. Tired of bringing the connection up manually and not having remotely access for this reason when I was away from home, I decided to buy a new router. I bought the U.S. Robotics Wireless MAXg ADSL Gateway. I bought two US Robotics access points USR5451, one for each floor, while in the basement the WiFi was covered by the USR gateway.

Last week I made an ADSL line upgrade, to 4 Mbps. Since then, I was not able to upload jpeg/png files to Dreamhost. I was not able to post to this blog. After a few days I was not able to post to forums, while downloading was flawless, it seemed that there was a problem with some kind of data. For example, I was able to upload via scp/ftp some TXT files, but not rtfd or png/jpeg/tiff files.

First, I blamed Dreamhost. I believed that there was something wrong with their filesystem. Maybe an upgrade or some quota configuration was the source of the problem. I sent two e-mails complaining about this, but I didn’t get an answer. Not yet at least and it’s been a week since the first mail! Anyway, afterwards, enlightenment came and I thought that this issue came along with the line upgrade. So the provider, OTENET, may had some filters that could create file corruption issues, for some specific file formats. A friend gave an account to his machine and let me try to upload files to dreamhost from his host. It was possible so, it was clear that Dreamhost was not the problem. The problem was from my side. After a few frustrating hours of searching, a friend told me to try another ADSL modem/router. I had the old speedtouch somewhere lying there. Guess what! The problem was solved. The USRobotics modem/router for some reason it corrupted the png/jpeg and some rtfd files. After changing the router, everything worked fine!

I was not able to write blog posts, or answer to forums. I was able to download torrents though and share torrents. No idea how or why this happened. I’m really bored and tired of losing time, to troubleshooting like this. I’m not a student that looses countless hours trying to make Linux usable. My experience allows me to solve my problems quickly or look for help to the right places. Still, I’m tired of this kind of shit. Next time I buy a router it will be a CISCO router, just to avoid shit. I know it’s probably overpriced for me, because I don’t need the firewall that comes along. I like the OpenBSD’s firewall and I don’t have QoS needs, although CISCO’s QoS handling, bandwidth manager and firewall could be life-saviour, even for a small home network, but I am so fucking tired of loosing time with this kind of nonsense troubleshooting that I’ll gladly pay for something that works as it should.