Mother dropped off the Internet last night. No big deal, I thought, just call the KDDI staff to have mother rebooted. Two hours passed, and mother was still unaccessible. Another reboot and still no good. The KDDI staff plugged a monitor to mother, and told me that mother appeared to be unresponsive, with a bunch of error given by NTP (network time protocol). Great I thought, network problem.
So this morning I went to Telehouse w/ a spare ethernet card, a big 16-port (the only non-amateurish around the house) 3com switch, and my TiBook (can’t beat a *nix computer for trouble-shooting network problems!)
Turned out that someone accidentally unplugged a ethernet cable on the patch panel linking mother w/ the big KDDI Catalyst router.
Note to myself: next time, before arranging for a reboot, ping the gateway address first!