I still get a little excited over Pi Day for one reason or another. For me, it's the superior nerdy holiday versus the likes of Mole Day because duh. But today has not been great day.
Things started out well enough. I squeezed in a gentle yoga flow before I started my day - this marks my second day back on the yoga mat. My tasks for the day weren't overwhelming and I was pretty confident that I was going to end this workweek on a relatively high note.
It all started to go downhill when our internet started disconnecting every few minutes. Tobie had gone through a similar spell while I was in Singapore and we had hoped it was just the wires being loose. But since it was happening again today despite past efforts to better secure things. We had speculated that it might be an ISP-related issue since there were other complaints about Globe this month, so that was my first investigation. But first, I had to suffer through a call with a client where I kept dropping out just as I had started talking. That was terrible. And mobile data is equally terrible in the village, so there was just no winning at that point.
So right after the call, I tried changing the ISP priority of our switch, which in turn is connected to our Orbi mesh router system. This naturally called for resetting the different elements of the system to have all the changes take effect. The Internet seems to have stabilized in the main house...but now we were completely without internet. From hereon, all my efforts to get our Orbi satellite back onto the main network despite the wired backhaul that had first solved our internet issues at the Sietch just failed. By the end, I had the satellite practically beside the main router, and for some reason it still wasn't connecting even after several factory resets of the satellite.
As all this was going on, I still had a few deliverables that people at work were checking in on AND I was trying to remotely troubleshoot a weird technical issue one of our clients was going through and I wasn't having a lot of success on that front either. You can imagine how increasingly frustrated I was getting as I felt like I was failing repeatedly and somehow simultaneously. And if I couldn't get the internet in the Sietch to work, then we'd have to go back to working out of the main dining room and we'd lose our evening entertainment options.
My only sort of eureka moment was when I gave up on trying to make the Orbi satellite work and looked for a completely different solution. Tobie was super supportive and was even saying we should go to the mall and get a replacement ethernet cable to see if that would help, but thankfully I had a weird alternate option - the old Google WiFi pods from our BGC setup. Ironically, I was preparing to try to sell them to find a better home for them so they were on their way out. And I had previously tried to make them work with the Orbi system, but they're incompatible. I don't know why I didn't think of using the same long ethernet cable to just connect the Google WiFi unit to the network switch instead.
I had to mentally shift gears to set up a whole other network in the Sietch, but it felt like the right thing to do. This helped me confirm that the cable was fine - the issues are really isolated to that Orbi satellite. I still had to figure out how to factory reset the old Google WiFi pods, but I eventually got them working. And then I had to get all our devices on the network along with resetting our Google Home Mini smart speakers just to reestablish order. I got everything back in working order by the end of my work day, so there was a hurried rush to get my more urgent tasks done now that we were back online.
I still want to figure out what happened to that other Orbi unit, but at least I'm no longer pressured to hang onto it as our internet lifeline. I know I wasn't very good company during the 3-4 hours I was driving myself crazy trying to get the Sietch back in order and I am all the more grateful that Tobie puts up with me when I get like this. At least we can breathe easy for now - I'm pretty sure the Google WiFi pods will be sufficient to keep us connected until I decide to invest in a more advanced system eventually. Now I'm actually having a drink to try to shake off the heavy feeling because we do have a good weekend to look forward to.
Happy weekend, everyone. May your internet connection remain strong and consistent.
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