Back online

The SandCastle Wired router gave up the ghost today.  The SCSon reports it was about 0930.  He was watching YouTube vids and then.... nothing.  But the SCQueen who connects wirelessly had no problem.  That suggests the problem is not with the ISP, but rather the Wired net had died.

Home for lunch I tried to log into the router (192.168.0.1).  "webpage not available".  I pinged it but it came back 100% fail.  These things don't last forever.  Best guess this one was 7+YO.  

The SCSon and I visited our local electronics emporium and came home with a new DSL modem/router.  The only hard part of replacing the model is finding the account name & password that the router uses.  The only time it's used is setting up the new modem and that's been 7+ years.  A phone call four phone calls to ISP support later we had the info.  I should probably put that someplace safe where I'll be able to find it next time...

The network has been configured with the WPA key and default admin password changed.  I think we are good to go!

7+ years, I'm not going to quibble.  But I wish they had a graceful failure mode!  This "sudden death" behavior leaves a lot to be desired.  I can't help but wonder if this is a Tin Whisker failure.