Failure
Gah. I went over to Kim’s to install her new AirPort Extreme base station. Adelphia seemed to be granting DHCP leases based on MAC address, so I called tech support to get things updated to the AirPort’s MAC address.
Apparently the RCA cable modem (have I ever ranted about how much I loathe the term modem in connection with cable?) is actually granted an internal IP address by the cable company and runs a lightweight DHCP server locally to grant the world addressable address. Anyway, tech support assured me that power cycling the modem would let it grant a lease to a new MAC address. So I cycled the power and still got a self-assigned address. Uh-oh.
This was the quickest move up the tech-support ladder I have ever experienced. The problem seemed to be a schroedinbug; The cable modem, according to the tech, shouldn’t have even been working with the old computer. And by realizing that and cycling the power to try to fix the problem it did indeed stop working. So an Adelphia tech is supposed to come by for a visit to fix the problem next week which sucks since Kim and Matt won’t have internet access during that time. Bah.
After that I came home only to find mangala freaking out. In the handfull of hours I had been gone, my until-now trusty Adaptec SCSI card died. The problem seemed more complex than that due to the filesystem caching which was allowing me to see some files and directories in my home directory but nothing else. Upon reboot nothing worked. Booting from a rescue CD allows me to see that my SCSI boot drive no longer shows up. Bah.