After 230 days of uptime...

...I was forced to reboot my FreeBSD machine today. For the last several months, Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) have been noticing some terrible latency on our DSL connection, as high as 17,000 ms for the first hop. In the past, I have found that reseting our Westell CPE has fixed the problem. But when it happened again yesterday, the CPE reboot trick didn't fix the problem.

This really screwed Kevin over, who uses Microsoft Remote Desktop frequently, and planned to work last night. It was a mild annoyance to me -- with 17,000 ms latency, the web and e-mail were basically unusable. I tried calling tech support last night, but the 24 hour help line was closed.

So, when I woke up this morning, the first thing that I did was to call. Because I knew, that if I didn't fix this thing, I would have an all-out riot on my hands (from Kevin). After fighting with the technical support person for the better part of 40 minutes, we came to an impasse. He said that everything was working fine in the network, and I was saying that my FreeBSD / MacOS X combo was definitely not to blame.

I went to work with things still broken, and resolved to come home "earlyish", and hook my Mac directly to the DSL modem, and call again. That would be a scenario that is much more understandable for tech support, and then I could get some resolution. When I got home, I checked that the latency of the DSL link was still through the roof (it was). So, I hooked my Mac up, and checked again. And I'll be damned if things weren't fine. I surfed around, did a speed test, everything -- the thing was performing like a champ.

My faith in life shaken, I came to realize that my FreeBSD box was causing the problem. So, because I didn't have time to troubleshoot any longer, I rebooted it. And that fixed it. Argh!

The Geek Tax having been paid, I am hoping that this is not a sign of impending hardware failure. Or the apocalypse. Either of those two would seriously put me out, anyway.

-Andy.