Windows 7: IP Address Conflict: The Ol' Switcheroo

As described in a previous post, after approximately two centuries of trying to resolve an "IP address" conflict among the computers in my home network, traveling across thousands of miles of Internet highways in search of wisdom, I had happened to notice Event Viewer, and had started to use its error messages to figure out where the problem was.  Information from those messages led me to examine reports from my modem's internal webpage, among other things.  I had finally stumbled across what seemed like traces of a rational approach to troubleshooting network problems:  I would go into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer, would identify the error messages relevant to the network situation, and would try to figure out what they meant.  I was now engaged in that figuring-out process.

The concept seemed to be that my brand of DSL modem had just one DHCP address:  192.168.1.64.  Just one computer would get it.  There was, in theory, a process where the computer coming to the party last would get its turn at the modem.  That was not what was happening on my system, though.  I was seeing that computer B was hogging access to the modem.

Unlike most home networks, I was not using a router.  The reason was that my router had stopped working during these ethernet wars.  I don't know if my network screwed it up, or if it was just taking a break, or what.  I had debricked it, as described in another previous post, and had otherwise played around with, and had given up on it until its replacement arrived in the mail, a week or so hence.

What I was using, instead, was a Netgear FS605 v3 switch.  This was not a wireless device, which was fine; my home network was entirely wired.  I was not clear on the differences between routers and switches, within this context, and that was part of what I wanted to understand now.  But mostly I wondered why the switch was not arbitrating successfully among computers.  I had used this switch for substantial chunks of time, over the last couple of years.  It had not previously had a problem in letting multiple computers share a single incoming ethernet line, such as the single 192.168.1.64 line coming in from the DSL modem.  Was I remembering things wrong?  Or had it, too, somehow gotten fried by all the network action that had seemingly toasted my router?

To explore these mysteries, I ran a search.  This search led to a drawing of a system with a router and another drawing of a system with a switch.  Now I saw what I had been misunderstanding.  Basically, a router could serve as a gateway, while a switch could not.  From the perspective of a home user looking out upon the world, a switch had to be on this side of a gateway.  The gateway could be a computer or a router.  When I had previously used the switch to arbitrate among multiple computers, as I now recalled, I had done so in a university residence setting, where the university itself provided a gateway.  In other words, a switch could be within a network, but it could not mediate between, say, a home local-area network (LAN) and the Internet as a huge wide-area network (WAN).

But couldn't my combination modem/router provide that function?  I searched for insight.  One user reported connecting a cable modem (or combination modem/router) to a switch.  A webpage said, likewise, that a modem could be connected directly to a LAN switch.  Another search led to a discussion suggesting that the problem with a switch might be that the ISP (in my case, AT&T) would allow only one connection to the Internet at a time, whereas my switch was attempting two or more.  I wasn't sure I understood that.  But the matter seemed to be cleared up by a definitive statement:

Routers are also the only one of these three devices [i.e., routers, switches, hubs] that will allow you to share a single IP address among multiple network clients.

On this basis, it appeared that my network problems had been due to (a) a bad router and (b) my mistaken attempt to make a switch function as a router.  The question now was whether the router had been bad indeed.  My computers could still communicate with it, as discussed in previous posts, so the acid test would be to plug in the replacement and see what happened.

So I went out to Wal-Mart and got a Belkin Connect N150, model no. F7D5301 v. 1.  Their setup procedure didn't seem to work quite right, so I called their tech support at 877-736-5771.  Within ten minutes, I was up and running on both machines.  No connect issues.  Time to dump the old router.  I wasn't sure how to test the switch, to see if it was at all still good, so I just shelved it.

Windows 7 Fails to Detect Other Computer on Network

I was becoming acquainted with Windows 7.  Sometimes, when I booted it up, it would immediately recognize the other computer (running Windows XP) on my home network, and would also recognize the (Linux-based) Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) device I had connected.  At other times, unfortunately, the Win7 computer would only see itself.  This post describes steps I took to resolve that inconsistency.

I did a search on this problem.  I was inspired to undertake this investigation after I used System Restore to restore an earlier state of the computer.  Those other devices were now not visible in Windows Explorer.  They had been visible just a few minutes earlier.  To my knowledge, I had not done anything that would have made those devices more visible, or less so.

When I searched, I noticed a post in which someone said that Windows 7 was also losing track of drive mapping after it went into sleep mode.  I wondered if that was related.  The previous day, the computer had magically mapped drive D, a network drive on the Synology NAS, without any instruction from me to do so.  The poster said that he was experiencing both of these problems.  That particular thread concluded without an indication of a solution.  One poster said, "Ultimately this is just the nature of the way networking is sometimes."  But it seemed to me that it had never been that way between the XP machine and the NAS, or between the NAS and the Ubuntu setup that I had been using before I got Windows 7.

I wondered if it was somehow an XP problem.  The WinXP machine was currently in touch with the NAS.  Was it possibly barring the Win7 machine from seeing either itself or the NAS?  I rebooted the WinXP machine, but that didn't make a difference on the Win7 machine.

It wasn't a hardware problem, or even a networking problem per se.  Access to the Synology unit was through a web-based program.  On the Win7 computer, I could go into that Synology program and could communicate with the Synology NAS unit.  Synology could see the NAS unit, but Microsoft couldn't.  Apparently whatever was keeping Win7 from seeing the NAS was also keeping it from seeing the WinXP machine.  It was all or nothing:  either Win7 could see them both, or (as at present) it could see neither.

After going online in Internet Explorer and accessing the Synology NAS from the Win7 machine, I rebooted the Win7 machine.  That did not make a difference.  The Win7 machine was still unable to see the others.

In Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Troubleshoot problems, I tried the Incoming Connections option and said, "Find this computer on the network."  It came back with this advice:

Reconfigure your network

To prevent problems other computers or devices might have when connecting to your computer, no more than one device should perform network address translation (NAT).

I followed the link into Windows Help and Support, but that wasn't actually too helpful and supportive.  I clicked Next, and the Incoming Connections troubleshooter confirmed, "More than one device is performing network address translation (NAT)."  So, OK, which device?  I clicked "View detailed information" and went into Detection Details.  All I could find there that looked like it might be informative was a Network Diagnostics Log.  Following the links there in the Help dialogs, it seemed that, to open that up, I would have to use ThermaData Logger software.  This software seemed to be almost completely unknown through the vendor, ETI Software, that Win7 pointed me to, but I did find plenty of links for it elsewhere.  I had no idea why Microsoft required me to download a 29MB file from a slow connection just to read a log file.  While I was waiting on that, I found ThermoWorks -- the need for using thermal logging software was another mystery -- and was right on the verge of downloading their ThermaData Software Suite for Windows when I looked back at the Help dialog and decided to try instead downloading ThermaData Studio 1.0.5, which was apparently an entirely different deal.  That turned out to be a 12MB file.  While that was downloading, I went back to the dialog and clicked on the "Other Networking Configuration and Logs" link to open NetworkConfiguration.cab.  That led me to two text files:  ipconfig.all.txt and route.print.txt.  Neither contained any obvious references to NAT.  I installed ThermaData Studio.  Back in the dialog, I tried again on the link to the Network Diagnostics Log.  ThermaData Studio wasn't going to read it right there on the spot, so I downloaded the log and tried opening it from there.  But when I double-clicked on it, I got a message, "Windows can't open this file."  I went into the Start Menu and opened ThermaData Studio from there and tried to use it to view the file that I had downloaded.  At first, it didn't see anything -- it was looking for .msdb files -- but when I told it to look for .etl files, it found the download.  It gave me a completely empty file.  ThermaData Studio looked like solid software, but since I did not need it after all, I uninstalled it.

We were left with the question of which devices on my system were set to NAT.  Trying another approach, I disconnected the WinXP machine from the network and re-ran the Win7 Incoming Connections troubleshooter.  That didn't eliminate the NAT problem.  I reconnected the WinXP machine, disconnected the modem from the router, and ran the troubleshooter again.  Now the NAT problem was gone, though now there was a new problem, where the troubleshooter said it needed more information.  So, OK, possibly the modem plus at least one other device was doing NAT on my network.  I had seen a post indicating that modems and routers can both do NAT, so I plugged everything back where it belonged and looked at the pages on port forwarding and putting a router into bridge mode that that post linked to.  Following what the latter seemed to be saying, I looked at a sticker on the bottom of my modem.  (I didn't seem to have a manual for it, but could probably have downloaded one.)  It gave me an IP address to enter into my Internet browser; and when I went to the appropriate page, it asked me for a code that appeared on that sticker.  This led me into the configuration software for the modem.  After poking around for a minute, I found a page for the modem's PPP location.  This seemed to be what I wanted.  It gave me two options:

PPP is on the modem.  This is the normal mode for this modem.  The PPP session is initiated from the modem.

PPP is on the computer, gateway or router.  This should only be used if you need to run a PPPoE client on your PC or you use another device (e.g., gateway or router) to initiate a PPPoE session.  This is often referred to as "Bridged" mode.

Since option A wasn't working for me, and since the post seemed to be saying that I should use option B, I switched to that and saved the change.  This gave me a Location Warning.  It said,

When using Bridged mode, your access to the modem becomes limited.  To return to the DSL modem user interface after this change you need to directly connect your PC to the modem without any gateway or router between the modem and the PC, and configure your computer appropriately.

Configure the IP address of your computer to be on the same network as the modem by using an IP address of the form 198.168.1.x (except 192.168.1.254) and a network mask of 255.255.255.0.

You may also return to the DSL modem user interface by resetting the modem back to its initial defaults.  All configuration changes and other settings will no longer be available if this is done.  To reset the modem press the "Reset" button located on the back of the modem.

We still had a problem.  The modem was supposed to be restarting, but it wasn't working.  It had three green lights on, including the one for the ethernet (i.e., router).  But why wasn't its Internet light on?  I unplugged its power cord, waited a minute or so, and plugged it back in.  That didn't help.  I tried the same thing with its Internet (i.e., telephone) cord.  When it was unplugged, the modem's DSL light was flashing red.  So I seemed to have a mistaken understanding of the difference between its DSL and Internet lights.  Well, whatever.  It wasn't working, is the point.  I thought that possibly AT&T (my ISP) needed the modem to be in the other mode.  I thought about calling them to ask, but Christ, to enter again into that vale of tears:  no way.

Well, I would have liked to research the modem situation further, but there was just one problem:  I couldn't, as I now had no Internet connection.  I ripped off the sticker on the back of the modem that said, "Remove only if advised by tech support" and there, in all its glory, behold:  the Reset Hole.  I jammed a paper clip into it and watched in amazement as this achieved ... nothing.  It seemed the Reset Hole had gone stale.  It took a couple of tries, and possibly the discovery that this unit required a minimum of 30 seconds of pressure in the hole to achieve the desired reset.  Even so, I could get online only by cabling the computer directly to the modem.  The router seemed to be dysfunctional.  There was, inevitably, a call to AT&T after all, and it actually took only ten minutes

I went back to the modem's webpage, but was now getting "Unable to connect."  Taking plan B, I cabled the WinXP computer directly to the modem, as advised above.  But still, no joy.  No Internet light on the modem; Unable to connect in Firefox.  Now I had really done it.  I had gone and given myself no alternative but to call AT&T.  A half-hour later, we emerged with the discovery that I, in keeping with the spirit of the event, had lost my router password and unfortunately could not go online to figure out how to reset it, given that the reset button seemed to be having no effect no matter how thoroughly I massaged it.  Oh, and the modem was back in its original mode.  End of bridge mode strategy.

I ran a search on this reset problem.  It produced some possibilities.  One was that I needed to reset my TCP/IP preferences to match the router's IP address.  Another was that I just wasn't following the right steps to reset it.  Apparently it was too early to call it a brick; but even if it hadn't been, there seemed to be some kind of de-bricking option.  Or maybe I just needed to go through the full set of steps for setting up the network properly.  The part that I may have left out, in resetting the router, was that I did not disconnect all except the power cable before doing the reset.  So I did that now, and held the reset button down for an overly long time.  I replugged the cable between it and a computer.  In the computer's web browser, I went to 192.168.1.1.  This connected me to the router's webpage.  The password to get in, after resetting, was admin.  Now I set Wireless SSDI Broadcast to Disable.  The webpage said I needed to initiate the push-button setup at this point.  It seemed they were referring to the backlit Cisco Systems logo on the front of the unit; pressing it revealed that it was in fact a button, and this produced a message on the webpage:

Accepting clients!

You will be returned to the previous page after SES configuration completed.

It then did its thing for a couple of minutes, and then I was back at the webpage.  The manual seemed to indicate that WPA2 Personal would provide the best available security for my setup.  I enabled Wireless MAC filtering.  The manual said that the option to Filter Internet NAT Redirection "uses port forwarding to block access to local servers from local networked computers."  That sounded vaguely like what someone had said I needed to make my network work again, so I enabled it.  A search led to the advice that I should not enable these until I needed them.  I disabled Wireless Access Web, in this wired setting.  A few more settings, and then I was done -- and still unable to connect to the router.  The troubleshooter was going to be unable to give me much help, it seemed until I connected the router to the modem, so I did that.  That still wasn't working, so I used the router's webpage Administration > Diagnostic options to ping the local IP address of 192.168.1.1.  That worked, but was I just pinging the router itself?  I tried 192.168.1.100.  That worked too.  I thought maybe the Traceroute diagnostic would be more helpful.  It wasn't.

The manual gave some troubleshooting steps.  Following its guidance, I made sure the router's light was solid green.  The other instructions weren't applicable.  For a moment there, I gave up on life.  Then I ate a piece of chocolate and tried removing that NAT Redirection filter.  That wasn't the solution, but it gave me enough cockeyed optimism to try the Internet Connections troubleshooter.  It -- a veritable font of sharp-eyed discernment -- said this:

Your broadband modem is experiencing connectivity issues.

It said I had better power down the modem, wait 10 seconds until the lights were off, and then power it back up.  I decided to also plug its cable back in.  I was hoping that the troubleshooter would at least say, "Hey, we have found your modem -- so far, so good!" and I guess in a sense they did.  With everything duly de- and re-powered and cabled, I tried it again.  Now, by gum, we had a breakthrough:

Your computer appears to be correctly configured, but the device or resource (primary DNS server) is not responding.

What could this mean?  I had no idea.  I rolled the dice again on the Incoming Connections troubleshooter.  While that was running, I realized that a minor miracle had occurred.  Very quietly, while I was over there fixating on the Win7 computer, the computer on which I was writing this post had connected to the Internet -- through the cable, through the router, through the modem, through thick and thin!  And ... er, no, it hadn't.  Correction on that.

But at least there was a glimmer of hope.  By this point in the day, I had moved away from the Windows XP system, on the second computer:  I had rebooted with an Ubuntu live CD for maintenance purposes, and was therefore  writing this post in Firefox on that machine while it endured its maintenance throes.  And on that machine, for a minute there, I thought maybe it had made Contact.  But it had not.  I was in error.

Well, I had blown a good part of a day on a single troubleshooting problem.  This was, thankfully, a less frequent experience than it had been in years past.  I really and truly hated networking, and it probably showed, by this point, in my failure to grasp some obvious solution or to utilize some true-blue technique.  I really had no clue.  The problem wasn't with the modem or the Internet connection; I could save this post when I connected directly from the modem to this computer.  Possibly the problem wasn't between the Win7 computer and the router; the troubleshooter had felt that everything was in place there.

Trying something a little different, I got an ethernet switch off the shelf and connected both computers directly to the modem through that.  And, whoa, that changed everything instantly.  The Win7 computer popped up a dialog asking me to Set Network Location, and it was immediately connected to CNN.com, and the Ubuntu live CD spun up and updated this text shortly thereafter.  So.  It was the router.  I knew it all along.  What could this mean?  It could mean (a) the router was malfunctioning or (b) I did not have its settings right or (c) the real explanation, which I did not presently know.  Putting my money on (b), I reconnected the Win7 machine to the router, went to its webpage, and chose the Administration > Factory Defaults option.  When it was done wiping out all my hard work, it required the no-username, "admin" password entry.  I ran the Win7 Incoming Connections troubleshooter again.  It said it needed more info.  I tried it again with the modem connected to the router.  (CNN.com was not responding at that point.)  This came back with the message about how the modem was experiencing connectivity issues.

We seemed to have the beginnings of insight.  It appeared that I should have tried the ethernet switch and the factory defaults, right away, as alternatives to my custom configuration of the router.  Experiencing success with one or both of those alternative approaches would have clarified matters.

But that wouldn't be networking -- because, now that I had unplugged and replugged the switch a few times, it was no longer doing the job on either computer.  Everything was connected to it, as before, and the modem's lights looked right, but neither computer was able to connect.  With the switch still connected, I tried rebooting the Win7 computer.  It was no use.  The Win7 machine was still not able to see the world, and the Ubuntu computer was pretending to connect.  I powered down the switch and tried a direct connection from the modem to the Ubuntu computer.  Still crawling.  I powered down the modem for a minute.  That did it:  the Ubuntu machine was now going online without a sweat.  I tried the switch again.  That worked on both machines now.  So apparently the switch did get confused and need some time off.

The conclusion seemed to be that, if I needed a router, I needed to try a new one, and otherwise I should just use the switch and power it down for a while if it failed to work.

Both computers were now going online successfully.  What did the Win7 troubleshooters have to say about this?  The Internet Connection troubleshooter said that it "couldn't identify the problem."  This was apparently tactful speech:  it seemed to mean that it couldn't identify *a* problem, but didn't want to tell the user that s/he was imagining things.  The Incoming Connections troubleshooter said this:

Troubleshooting was unable to automatically fix all of the issues found.  You can find more details below.

Problems Found

Windows requires more information to diagnose the problem.

Here, too, there seemed to be a bit of a bullshit factor.  I had been taking these troubleshooters as though they meant exactly what they said -- that, in the latter case, there was a problem, though it was difficult to diagnose -- but now it began to seem that they might say this when there wasn't necessarily a problem.  Pointing me to an online source of the "more information" that the program needed was a funny gesture when, according to the troubleshooter itself, I might not be able to go online.  It seemed pretty lame, worthy of Windows 95.  After all, this was Microsoft's software reporting on Microsoft's software.

What remained, it seemed, was to choose between the switch and a new router.  That was a question for another post.

AT&T, Phone Home

Summary

Today, I spent 3.5 hours altogether, trying to communicate with AT&T about my bill. My previous calls and online communications had produced no results.

This time, as I discovered, I had to get through to an account specialist before anything would happen. Whatever the lower-level people told me was irrelevant. They were there essentially to tell me to pay some arbitrary amount and forget about the original promotion I had signed up for.

Tech support had no clue as to what I was seeing on my screen, or why. Their emulator did not reflect what was actually happening onscreen.

In my conversations with about 15-20 people at AT&T this morning, I found there were good people and also some cynical people. The latter would put me on hold and not come back, or would give me false information.

I am still not able to log into my account online, and am not able to contact AT&T by their "Contact Us" button, so I will still have to spend hours if I need to get information about my account, or corrections to it, in the future.

AT&T was the only option for service in my neighborhood. I hated to sign up with them, because I had experienced terrible customer service several years earlier with SBC, which was what AT&T was called previously. Unless I wind up in some future situation in which AT&T is the only option, I do not plan to ever have another account with them.

The following is the message in which I logged the details:

* * * * *

Dear AT&T:

This morning, I attempted to contact you through att.net. This failed, for reasons I will describe shortly. I then called you at the AT&T Internet Services number specified on my bill (877-722-3755). When I tried to get through to a human voice, that call was terminated.

I tried again and spoke with a call center staffer. He got my account number wrong twice, but eventually we got past that. Next, he insisted upon being given my cell phone number. I was unwilling to give him that number, mostly because I did not want to get into an extended conversation at a dime a minute. I finally stated it was 222-222-2222. I then asked for similar information in return, specifically, an AT&T email address to which I could send a description of the problem I was having when I tried to get through to you at att.net. He was unable to give me an email address. I know AT&T is a communication company; but this, I have to say, did not seem very communicative.

I asked to speak to his supervisor. The supervisor gave me the address to which I am sending this message: scam@abuse-att.net. This is obviously an odd address for customer service, so I have a feeling I will be forwarding this message on again. But possibly I can just post it on my blog and get it to you that way.

I then asked the supervisor if we could proceed to the issue that had prompted me to try to contact you through att.net, namely, the status of my bill. You had incorrectly set up two different accounts in my name at the same time, when I installed service here a few months ago, so I had had to call in and request that you straighten out my account. That took a couple of tries. The most recent one was several weeks ago. I have not received a corrected bill, so I was calling, now, to see whether that had been taken care of.

The supervisor informed me that, unfortunately, the number I had reached was technical assistance, and that he would have to transfer me to another number to take care of the bill. After carefully and kindly verifying that I was located in Indiana, he immediately forwarded me to your Texas office, where a very nice man named Gilbert verified my location and told me that he would not be able to help me and that I would have to call your Indiana office at 888-274-9056.

None of this was really very surprising, by the way. I had been an SBC customer several years ago, before the change of name to AT&T, and I had had to go through much the same kind of thing on repeated occasions. In a sense, it was reassuring to see that, for purposes of customer service, it was still a bad idea to break up the real AT&T, all those years ago. Service was very good, way back then.

But to continue. I was just trying to find out the status of my bill, and we were closing in on it: I did reach Linda at 888-274-9056, after a hold of only five minutes. She said AT&T has no customer service email address. She said my account has been blocked, and perhaps that's why I cannot get online, though that was actually not the problem; the website was simply malfunctioning, before we even got to the point of entering my account number. She did find it strange that your records were showing my account as still being active, despite being blocked. I have to confess, I was glad that it was still active, despite being blocked, because I was speaking with Linda on Skype, which would not have been possible if your accounting system had been functioning properly.

After a moment of digging around, Linda discovered that the credits had been issued weeks ago, in response to my previous call, but as she put it, they had not "flowed over" to actually be applied to my bill. Apparently the previous guy had not properly "disputed" the charges (her word). She said they would post $120 in credits to the bill that would be coming to me in a week or two. Linda was an agreeable individual. She put me on hold while she verified with your Payments department that they would actually sort out my account. She said I might have a "restoral" fee of $25; if so, she said, I would have to call back again to dispute that. Altogether, the process of contacting you about my bill took about an hour.

Linda said that, if I wanted an email address for tech support, she would have to refer my phone call to tech support, and maybe they could give me one. I did have the address shown above, but by this point I was seriously doubting it, so I went with Linda on this. The number she referred me to was the one on my bill, under the "Billing Summary" heading; evidently this was not actually a billing phone number. The technician said that he would attempt to find an email address for tech support. He was not able to do so.

So we went through things the slow, painful way. It took another two hours. I didn't know it would take that long, else I wouldn't have bothered. But it's probably just as well that I did. I was afraid that, next time you screwed up my bill, you might fail to screw up the process of cutting off my service -- that is, you might actually succeed in shutting me down in the middle of a project -- so I thought I had probably better do my best to get access to my account through the webpage. Ideally, this would actually spare me from having to spend more hours at this, sometime in the future.

First off, I showed the technician that the "Contact Us" link on your main webpage was not functioning. I don't know how long it's been like that. Let me summarize this: the AT&T webpage for the world was not accepting attempts at contact, and I had to be the one to point it out. This cannot be a great comment on your webpage designers. I say that because, if they had done their job properly, I would have had two extra hours this morning to do more constructive things with, and I'm sure lots of other people have been in the same position.

Then we tried to get me registered, so that I could actually look at my account online. This brought a whole new spectrum of difficulties. Example: my account number begins with a zero. But when I tried to enter that number on the registration page, I got an error message indicating that an account number cannot begin with a zero. The technician and I went through this several times, from different angles. I was trying on two different computers, so it seemed that this, again, must have been a problem that many AT&T users have run into. So instead of processing those customers efficiently through your website, your inaccessibility has forced them to route these problems through your call center, or simply not bother trying to register online.

The technician said that, ordinarily, AT&T sends a registration code by snail mail. I told him that I hadn't received anything like that. After he checked a bunch of things and put me on hold a bunch of times, the conclusion we reached was that he had to transfer me back to the billing department, albeit at a different number (800-288-2020). The lady there was talking kind of fast, but she referred to my account number (beginning with a zero) as a "dry-lube" account. I don't think "lube" was actually the word she used, but it was vaguely something like that. Link, maybe. Anyway, she had to transfer me back to Indiana after all, and that took only another couple of minutes. The hold music, in this case, was steel drums. I like Jamaican, but this was not a very good selection. But at least I was becoming more attuned to such matters, as I gradually settled into my new life role as an AT&T customer on hold.

The billing technician took me through the same steps as I had just gone through with the tech support guy, and after about ten minutes, we wound up back at the same error message, informing me that I could not request a registration code because an account number cannot have a zero as its first digit. The billing guy got back in touch with tech support because, as he said, "It shouldn't do that, at all." I thought he was putting me on hold, but then it turned out I was being forwarded back to tech support again. So it was, like, goodbye to the billing guy.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I was actually providing a valuable public service, in that I was helping AT&T troubleshoot its webpage. And this was exactly why I had signed up with AT&T again, after those previous experiences. Well, that and the fact that there didn't seem to be any other high-speed service in this particular town, though I must admit I was getting curious about whether maybe I should have looked harder for an alternative.

By the way, I found that I had sufficient time to write all this out in detail, once I decided that the email address (above) was almost surely a joke at my expense, and that I would therefore have to be posting this on my blog. So, in the spirit of my blog posts generally, at a certain point in this process, I tried to log the steps in the process more carefully than I had done at the outset of this message.

This time around, at tech support, I got a lady with a sense of humor. I mean, I think I amused her, because it sounded like she was sort of laughing at me. I realized, after a moment, that possibly she thought I was an idiot because I was going through the steps so slowly, so I sped it up a bit, and started to check in with her at each step. I had learned, along the way, that AT&T tech support uses an emulator to give them a rough idea of what the screen is actually like for the customer, so probably she just found it humorous that someone would think she was not familiar with the webpages she had to go through a million times every day. I sympathized with her for that, and I had to admit that my problem, again, was not with her, so much as with the web programmers who had not constructed the emulator to emulate accurately.

Anyway, she did seem to understand what I was saying, once I took her through it step by step, and she seemed to be taking me more seriously now, so I guess that was progress. But then I wasn't sure that she actually had understood the situation after all, because, once again, she took me through the same steps that, I swear, I had gone through at least 15 times by this point. Then she put me on hold and ...

... and, unfortunately, at that point, AT&T did finally get its act together and cut off my service. The Skype call died.  Note to self:  if it works, don't fix it.  They may have been threatening to cut off my service because I refused to pay the wrong amounts, but they weren't actually able to figure out how to do that until I contacted them.

So now I really did have to start racking up cell phone minutes. I called the billing department and got a man who was so -- and I'm sorry to say this, but he was just really a decidedly unintelligent individual, to the point that I was ashamed of myself for expecting on-the-ball performance from someone who did not appear to have that capability. I don't mean that snidely. I know people with disabilities. I honestly mean that this guy seemed to have a disability that impaired his ability to perform what I thought was his job. I wasn't expecting that, and ... well, anyway, so when he really wasn't getting what I was saying, eventually I asked to speak to his supervisor. But he didn't want to transfer me to his supervisor. When I insisted several times, he put me on hold, and after a while of that, I hung up and called back. This time, I got a woman who explained very clearly the wrong promotion, one that I hadn't signed up for. After she was finished with her presentation, I asked to speak to her supervisor. She told me that, instead, I should speak to a specialist. I was willing to try that, so she forwarded me to someone who was, actually, not a specialist, and after going through the same song and dance again, she forwarded me to another person who did sound like a real specialist.

That call lasted another 32 minutes. By the end, the woman had taken my credit card number, had sorted out the correct amount that I should be billed for, and had forwarded to her supervisor a request that I be put back online as soon as possible. That was at 12:25 PM. I had started this process at about 8:50 AM. Twenty minutes later, I was back online. But since there was still no online access to my account, I would have to go back through something like this process again, next time I wanted to sort out something related to my account.

AT&T DSL Installation

I decided to try using AT&T's DSL as my Internet service provider (ISP). Based on what the AT&T representative said, it sounded like I would want their Pro service, at $30 per month, for a connection speed of "up to" 3.0 Mbps, if I wanted speed comparable to cable. There was also the Elite service, for $35, for a 6.0 Mbps connection. Less expensively, AT&T offered Basic ($20) and Express ($25) services, with connection speeds of "up to" 768 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps, respectively. She said I could change at any time, with just a phone call, so I decided to see what the Express service would give me for $25 per month. (For reference purposes, that 1.5 Mbps service, at 7 AM on a weekday, looked like it would give me a 700MB Ubuntu ISO download in about 105 minutes, when I was not doing heavy browsing or otherwise taxing my machine, for an average of about 6.7MB per minute, or about 110KB per second. I say it "looked like" it would do that, because in fact it did not complete the job. After a half-dozen abortive tries, I gave up and went over to the university with its very fast connection, where I downloaded the same ISO in about five minutes.) The representative didn't tell me that I could get the $50 modem or $80 gateway for free if I ordered Pro or Elite service online. I would have done my shopping online, but unfortunately I could not go online -- not at home, anyway. At this writing, I was thinking I probably should call AT&T and suggest that their introductory recording should notify callers that they will get a better deal by ordering online -- which I would have done, at a public computer if necessary. When I called to follow up on my order, the automated voice system for DSL service (877-722-3755) told me that my service was to be installed by 8 PM. But 8 PM came and went and there were no fireworks, no bells ringing, no amazing flashing lights on the Internet switch that I had been using to connect two computers to the single incoming line in my previous Ethernet-wired building. I called their voice response system again and got the same recording as before. This time, I insisted on speaking to someone, and that got me through to a nice woman -- in India, I guessed, from her accent. She walked me through the process. This was necessary because the installation CD that came via UPS with my new Motorola gateway modem was strongly convinced that I did not have an Ethernet adapter in my computer, and I was not able to persuade it otherwise. The installation CD balked and would go no further, so I carefully placed it into that special zone that I reserve for CDs that disagree with me. I didn't take good notes while talking to the lady, so you'll probably have to call her for yourself, if you want to relive my own experience in that tech support call. One thing that happened was that she steered me to a webpage that asked all kinds of goofy verification questions (e.g., what was the color of my third least favorite cat -- to exaggerate slightly), and eventually I finished the registration experience and had my own AT&T e-mail account and login page (att.yahoo.com), as well as the address of a page for further tech support (helpme.att.net). Everything was good, and I was up and running. Next day, however, when I turned on the computer, I found that neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox would connect to any webpages. I called back to the 800 number (or, I guess, the 877 number) and was privileged to work with another Indian person, although this one was male and not nearly as nice or communicative as the young lady who had kindly assisted me the previous evening. He was OK, and we did OK; I just didn't find that he was really having his best day. He kept referring to screens and options that did not exist until I worked out for myself what he was trying to say. What emerged from that conversation was that AT&T DSL was incompatible with the ZoneAlarm firewall unless I cared to figure out, on my own, how to configure Zone Alarm so that it would be compatible. The man did not know why I was able to browse without any problem on the previous evening. But my tinkering did verify that, specifically, I could browse online only if (a) I right-clicked on the ZoneAlarm icon in the Windows XP system tray and selected the "Shutdown ZoneAlarm" option or (b) I opened up the ZoneAlarm Control Center and, within the Firewall tab, set Internet Security to medium rather than high. I was not entirely comfortable with the medium setting because ZoneAlarm said that this meant my computer would be visible to hackers. I preferred the "stealth" posture afforded by the high security setting. To achieve high security, I tried going into ZoneAlarm's Firewall > Zones option, where I added my modem's IP address. I wouldn't have known what this was, but the somewhat nice Indian gentlemen had let slip that 192.168.1.254 was the IP address of my modem, and later I noticed it was actually printed on a sticker on the back of the modem. (That number is apparently the default for a lot of modems.) So that's the IP address that I typed into the ZoneAlarm IP Address box on the Zones tab. But apparently that's wasn't good enough, because I still wasn't able to browse until I went back to the Firewall > Main tab and set the sucker back to medium. (We're talking about the slider for the security level for ZoneAlarm's Internet Zone, not for its Trusted Zone.) I thought maybe someone else would have superior expertise in this area, so I tried a customized Google search. A posting by La Luna at Broadband Reports made me think that possibly I was having this problem because of some Microsoft updates I had just installed the previous evening, during my browsing. (Later, while waiting on hold with another tech support call to AT&T, I heard a recording that said Microsoft had indeed released an update that had the effect of restricting access for some Windows users. "Some" may have included me. But meanwhile, events continued to unfold, and ultimately appeared to render the point moot for the time being.) Having downloaded some but not all of the available updates on this new WinXP installation, I was thinking that more updates could be the solution for me. I saw, from Zone Alarm > Overview > Product Info, that I was using version 7.0.470.000. I downloaded the latest version of Zone Alarm, but was not sure what version that might be. The website wasn't saying and it wasn't in the filename. It seemed I would have to install the version to see what version it was. But we didn't get there. I started scouting around for others who might have insights of value. It looked like MistyEyes on the ZoneAlarm forum was having exactly the same problem. In response to his/her question, the advice from Oldsod was as follows:

Make sure your DNS and DHCP server IP's are in your Firewall's Trusted zone. Finding DNS and DCHP servers, etc.:

1. Go to Run type in command , hit 'ok', and type ipconfig /all then press enter. In the returned data list will be a line DNS and DHCP Servers with the IP address(s) listed out to the side. 2. In ZA on your machine on the Firewall>Zones tab click Add and then select IP Address. Make sure the Zone is set to Trusted. 3. Click OK and then Apply and see if that works to fix it. 4. The localhost (127.0.0.1) must be listed as Trusted. 5. The Generic Host Process (svchost.exe) must have server rights for the Trusted Zone. Plus it must have both Trusted and Internet Access. http://zonealarm.donhoover.net/dnsdhcp.html

But I didn't get to that point either, because now my virus scanner informed me that, after a mere two hours of screwing around online, I had already contracted a Trojan virus. That gave me pause. I had been computing for two years without a virus. Now, in a couple of hours, I had one, apparently because I had lowered my firewall because the AT&T DSL modem wouldn't work otherwise. Further scouting around online led to the understanding that people who use cable or DSL modems are advised to use both hardware and software firewalls. ZoneAlarm would be an example of a software firewall. I wasn't sure if a purchased copy of ZoneAlarm (I was using the free download version) would get along better with my DSL modem; some posts online made me think that it might not make any difference. It seemed that the reason I had had no viruses during the previous year, at least, was that my roommate had been using a wireless router and this had served as a hardware firewall. So if I wasn't going to be computing in a place (e.g., a corporate office or university) where they had a dedicated tech support staff and equipment to trim out the riffraff, and if I wasn't going to have a roommate with a wireless router, it appeared that I would have to buy one for myself. I priced one at Newegg for about $55 with shipping. I was just about to buy that router, and then I paused to think. We were talking about a router for $55, plus a delay of maybe five days (including a weekend) before Newegg would have it to me; and then the possibility that I would have to buy a more professional software firewall or other security program. I also discovered, along about this time, that my existing Symantec Antivirus was not even detecting the Trojan, and that the other freebie program that detected it was not going to remove it unless I bought a copy of their full program. (I might have suspected that they were just inventing the virus in order to persuade me to buy their product, but I had been using the freebie version for a year or more without any virus alarms until now.) So $55 for the router, maybe $40 or more for the security program, and downtime for the merchandise delivery. And the prospect of future downtime if it turned out that I still didn't have the virus formula quite right, and got another one. Plus the risk of lost files or information. It was enough to provoke some serious thinking. The computer on which I was trying to install the DSL modem, and was having all these hassles, was the second of my two computers. Some time previously, I had worked through the issues involved with getting a KVM switch, so that I could use one Keyboard, Video screen, and Mouse (KVM) for both computers. I had also been thinking, for quite some time, about installing Ubuntu Linux, but had previously decided that it was not quite ready for prime time. Now, however, as I saw that Linux continued to have a reputation of being relatively free of viruses and spyware, and as I reflected on how it had felt to worry that a hacker might be able to get his/her hands on my private data (having also read that financial motives are behind much of the hacking that takes place nowadays), it seemed to me that I could try this DSL thing again with Ubuntu. If that worked, I would not have to buy the router and all that Windows-oriented firewall software etc. -- at least not yet. So now the scenario was that, quite possibly, I would have only one of my two computers connected to the Internet. This would be an Ubuntu computer, my second (i.e., backup) computer. If I needed to look up something or download something, I would do that on the second machine. The main machine would still be a Windows XP machine; it just wouldn't have Internet privileges anymore -- or at least not until I invested in the router etc., or until I moved the computer to a different place with a safer Internet connection. To try this idea, the main challenge was to get the alternate computer set up with Ubuntu. I had a spare hard drive lying around, a small old one, but Linux doesn't generally take much space, so that was good enough. I unplugged the Windows drive (and just left it sit in the computer) and plugged in, instead, this other old drive. I used the downloaded Ubuntu ISO to burn a CD, and I used the CD to install Ubuntu on the old, spare drive. Installation was painless. It was really quite easy. Ubuntu 08.04 (meaning the April 2008 version) had continued to improve over its predecessors. The harder part was getting connected to the Internet. A very nice lady at AT&T tech support in India tried to help me, but really had no idea what I needed to do, and she said it would be a fee-based service if I wanted one of their Linux-trained techies to walk me through an installation. Reserving that option, I tried calling a tech support guy at the university. He was a little bit amused, but he also did seem to have some familiarity with Ubuntu or at least with Linux generally, and between the two of us, we were able to figure it out. Again, I did not take precise notes, but the following is a reconstruction of what I think we did. First, at the top right-hand corner of the default, unmodified Ubuntu screen, I left-clicked on the monitor-like icon whose yellow tooltip pop-up says "Manual network configuration." That gave me exactly one option, "Manual configuration." Being the kind of person who is very practical when there is no alternative, I selected that option. This took me to a Network Settings dialog with four tabs, of which I would need only the default Connections tab. There, I had two options, both of which were greyed out. Down at the bottom right corner, I chose the Unlock button, and that wiped away the grey. Now I chose Wired Connection, clicked on Properties, unselected Enable Roaming Mode, and chose Automatic Configuration (DHCP). I then clicked OK and Close. Then I went back to Firefox, which comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. I cleaned out the Address bar and typed in just the IP address of my modem again, with nothing else -- the same 192.168.1.254 number as above -- and hit Enter. That gave me a confirmation screen that I had seen the previous evening, when the Windows setup had been working OK with DSL. The tech support guy suggested I try a regular webpage, so I tried CNN.com. It worked! It was really that simple. I am typing the final paragraphs of this message on Firefox in Ubuntu, less than a half-hour after making that tech support call. It remains to be seen what all I can or cannot do in Ubuntu now, but at least the preliminary plan is to keep it running as my Internet gateway, and pick up whatever other Linux knowledge that may come my way as I go along. So, see, let it not be said that I hesitate to take a risk on something new. It has been less than nine years since I first became a Linux newbie, and already I'm at the point of being able to use Ubuntu to go online. I know, it's like -- whoa, slow down -- but that's the naked truth of the matter.