Communications were down
On top of Friday's trip to the hospital, one thing happened yesterday to really screw things up for me -- my cable modem stopped working. It's been the first time in more than a year that I didn't have any Internet connectivity -- quite disconcerting.
On Thursday night, apparently Comcast -- my cable company -- had a nationwide outage of its DNS system that lasted a good six hours or so. I had spent most of the day and much of the night tunneled into my corporate network through a VPN connection, so I actually had no problems -- until I dropped the VPN connection. Then everything went dead.
I had presumed that it was something modem-related so I figured a simple power-cycle would do the trick. All that did was screw the cable modem up completely, requiring a tech to actually pay us a visit yesterday afternoon. He fixed it and we're back up and running without any problems on this end now. Apparently sometimes the particular brand of cable modem I have requires a long, 11-second hard reset by pressing the power button. The guys on the phone don't know this, but it's common knowledge from the field techs.
Seems like a waste of resources, but I got to make a new friend -- the guy Comcast sent was an avid gamer, so we talked shop for about an hour after he fixed my stuff.