which_chick | (no subject)

I have DSL at my house, now. It's my xmas present. I was supposed to meet the guy between 1 and 5 and he wasn't here then. He'd been and gone by 1, left me a package of stuff on my front steps.

I opened the stuff and put everything out and started the CD of instructional goodness. Everything went pretty well until it failed all the damn ping tests. I rebooted everything, read the help (about ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew) and got an error message on the command line about the RPC server not being available. So, what the hell, I called tech support. (For newer readers, note that I spent about nine years of my life BEING tech support. I was the person who got called, not the person on the other end of the phone not-having-internet. My, how things change.)

I'd like to point out for the record here that I was in front of my computer with it turned on and the error message in question displayed on the screen when I called. The tech support guy was kind and walked me through assorted steps and screens. I typed what I was told to type and I did things the way I was told to do them even though I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between Start-Run-cmd and hitting the shortcut to the command line that I have on the desktop. We got nothing. We looked in AdministrativeTools-Services and the RPC thing was started automagically. We rebooted. We pointed and clicked. Finally the tech told me I would have to get a local tech or contact Microsoft because he could not solve my problem. If this is the experience most people have with tech support, no wonder they don't like to call.

*sigh* I was not very amused, but whatever. He did try and he was very pleasant about the whole thing, just out of ideas for fix0ring.

I hung up and went back to the internets on my shitty-ass 26.4 kbps line of dialup. I googled. Six clicks later, I had Check to see if your DHCP client is started. I checked. It wasn't. Oops. I turned it on in the aforementioned AdministrativeTools-Services thing (and set it to automatic from here on out) and there was light.

Why wasn't DHCP running in the first place? I don't know. The laptop is some four years old. Probably at one time or another, I went through and shut off all kinds of crap that I was never going to use and I betcha it got killed in the crossfire.