As has become well known (a few people at OSCON asked how my new job was going ;), my part time but growing occupation apart from my duties at RedMonk is as quasi-official network and sys admin for a small forest of family & friends PC’s (can’t help w/ Macs, unfortunately – though Linux is definitely in my wheelhouse). Tonight’s service call, received just a few minutes ago, was about a “network that doesn’t work – like at all.” After going through the obvious stuff, like whether or not both machines were affected and what had been tried, I asked about rebooting. They’d tried the modem, but not the Linksys router that I’d installed a few weeks ago. My preliminary diagnosis was locked up router, and so I had them shut both the modem and router down, then reboot both, modem first. As it has for me so many times before, it fixed the problem.
This problem is so frequent for a lot of folks in the technical field that its not even worth talking about. The difficulty is that for non-technologists, it’s anything but boring. Unlike problems with a PC, which are relatively self-contained and – in theory – easily fixed with a reboot, networking difficulties involve a complex chain of network card, cable/DSL modem, and the lines they come in on (and more and more often, a wifi access point of some kind). When you consider the fact that your average person has little to no conception of how any of those pieces work – let alone their dependencies – it’s not all that surprising that the problem is so confusing. The fact that the solution – rebooting the various devices – is relatively simple does nothing to allay the fact that the problem exists.
Now in this case it’s not the OS’s fault, and I can’t really fault the routers for getting hung up occasionally, given that PC’s do it all the time. But what’s just poor design is that the router is fundamentally incapable of communicating when it’s the problem. PC’s are great at that – they just stop working. Routers, on the other hand, often sit there blinking away. My own Netgear FM114P was in the habit of refusing connections on average of once every two days or so before I upgraded the firmware.
I wonder just how many millions of dollars worth of calls to ISPs, router manufacturers, Microsoft and me could be eliminated with the addition of a router function that watched when it was unable to function, and had some facility – LED, screen pop or otherwise – that said in effect, “I’m not working. Please reboot me.” Short of that, it’d be great if OS manufacturers included a simple dialogue that was triggered when networking was cut off, and walked users through a suggested dialogue of rebooting the various devices.
I know I’d sure appreciate it, as would a lot of my family and friends.
