Stardate 20030808.1754

(Ship's log): Maybe it actually is gremlins.

The networking tech-support guy just spent an hour here, and we did various kinds of tests. The upshot was that as far as he could tell, there was actually no problem with RR's stuff. We did various tests, including plugging my workstation directly into the modem and bypassing my LAN.

When his computer or my computer were plugged directly into the modem, upload and download bandwidth were about what they should be. But when I tried to do bandwidth testing through my lan, uploads were fine but downloads were seriously throttled.

So I tried doing an FTP from my server to my workstation and that was throttled, too. (Which is weird; that was one of the things I tried yesterday and it worked fine, too.)

Some of the total outages were actually due to the fact that they'd been doing work in this area recently. As to the rest, everything seemed to say that there was no problem with the modem at all. (Of course, it may be that there was a problem, but that they fixed it.)

After he left I powercycled both the workstation and the ethernet hub for my LAN, and after that my local FTP's were fine, and it also turned out that everything else seemed to be working fine, too. I do not for a minute believe, however, that this is over, but at least for the moment the symptoms seem to have abated. If I start having problems again, however, I'm going to be a lot more careful about making tests to prove it isn't my problem, as well as keeping more detailed notes about what I see and what I tried.

In the mean time, I've been trying for three days to write a piece which explains why I think a constitutional amendment regarding prayer in the schools would be a terrible idea. I was working on it when he arrived, but now I'm not in the mood to finish it, so it's going to have to wait a bit longer.

And I'd like to request that no one send me mail making suggestions for things to try regarding my technical problems. Thank you.