Stardate 20021005.1306

(Ship's log): The tech came out again yesterday afternoon, and we spent about three hours before he left. Some of that time was spent doing experiments with the modem he had given me the day before, to try to figure out what it was doing and why it was failing.

Then he replaced it, but we spent about an hour working on the new one and concluded that it was faulty, so he went and got yet another one and put it in place, and it seemed to work beautifully. Indeed, it has been working beautifully ever since.

He actually left two modems here. The other one is sitting on the floor and it's also jacked into the system. From the office, he's pinging both modems constantly. Should the modem I'm on ever reset again or otherwise lose connection, he wants to see if the other one does so at the same time. However, as it turns out, it hasn't happened. Still, the idea is sound: if one goes out and the other doesn't, then it's a modem problem. If they both go out at the same time, then it's a problem with the line. Of course, not having a failure at all is even better.

I've got "Ping Plotter" running on my laptop, tracerouting to a local server inside the Road Runner system every ten seconds, and since he left yesterday at 19:00 PDT performance has been uniformly excellent. There's been a total of 5 missed handshakes in 18 hours, out of more than 13,000, and that is quite acceptable performance.

I'm going to continue doing that test, and others, all weekend and he's going to be testing it remotely as well, and if by Monday it seems to be running properly then he'll come over and get the second modem.