When I hear myself asking a poor long-suffering client “have you tried turning it off and then on again?” I feel a little shudder of geeky anguish.
And yet, like asking them to check the connections, it can sometimes yield great results. I think I am going to begin a list of devices that refuse to play ball unless they are given this treatment from time to time.
Virgin Media Modem
First on the list is Virgin Media’s cable modem (255 or 256). To be fair it does say on the sticker on the modem to turn off the modem (and everything attached to it) and then turn it back on again, and connected devices sometime afterwards. A big clue if you are having internet connection problems. But you don’t immediately do that if you have been told that the problem is with something else on the network. In the case I am thinking of I was told that the problem was an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. And so it appeared to be because in the process of trying to fix it the client had totally scrambled its settings. But infact the true culprit was the modem that was not communicating with the Airport unless it was in bridge mode. The user had bypassed the Airport with a direct connection between Mac and modem, which did work, and so assumed the Airport was at fault. Well, you know what fixed it.
More to come as I meet with Macs and devices behaving in a flakey way.
Please feel free to add to the list in the comments.
Another modem to add to this list: the BT HomeHub. Though in this case it really required to be reset. Perversely this is achieved by pressing the wireless activation button on the back for 15 seconds. The client had been unable to connect wirelessly to the HomeHub and all the settings suggested he should be able to both see his network and connect to it. A simple restart didn’t work but a reset did. Happily with a BT HomeHub you don’t need to get the client to dig out broadband activation correspondence to look for passwords etc because authentication is done automatically using the BT phone number.