Today I arrived home from a 12 day business trip. While I was away my home network lost connectivity. When I arrived home, I started to investigate. dhclient was running. No IP address. Running it found no DHCP servers. The MoCA light was flashing red on the ONT. I called Verizon. We rebooted the OTN (or so I was told we were rebooting it). Then we rebooted my Verizon router, which was odd. The OTN is provisioned through the ethernet port, not coax. Therefore. the router was not trying to get an IP address. My gateway, which was directly connected to the OTN, was.
I was put onto the next level of support.
We went through the basics, including a request to reboot my computer (I did not). Try Internet Explorer. “It won’t work” I said. True.
Eventually, they asked me to change the ethernet cable. I doubted this would help. Coincidentally, I got an IP address with the new cable. I swapped the cables back. Yep. Got an IP address again.
I concluded: something was wrong with Verizon.
They concluded: it was the cable. Or at least the result of changing the cable fixed it.
My theory: for some reason, my provisioning setup changed while I was away. When I went away, it was working fine over ethernet. When I returned, the MoCA light was on. During my work with the second tech, they was dealing with another tech who was fixing the provisioning.
I believe that the success of dhclient while changing the cable was a coincidence. Something else was happening outside my network.
We’ll see how this goes.
FWIW, a few things are failing to work now that my IP address has changed. My firewall still has a few hardcoded IP addresses for home in it. For example: ssh and bacula-fd are restricted to my home IP address. I’ll look into this soon. Perhaps I should be backing up over my VPN, not over the public IP address.
More, later.
