When thinking about upcoming gigs, I try very hard not to picture how long I think it will take to complete them. I’ve had gigs that I think will take four hours take less than two; then I’ve had gigs that I’m confident will be done in a couple hours take over four. So I try to approach each one with the expectation that it will “take as long as it takes.” Still, it’s human nature to want to affix some time value to a given activity.

Saturday, I went to the home of a new client to do what I call a “full-metal install.” I’d been helping this guy pick out new equipment for his home – three new PCs and a networked printer. To be more specific, an HP Media Center TV PC, two Toshiba Core Duo laptops, and an HP OfficeJet 7210 networked all-in-one printer. He already had Comcast HSI running on an old Dell P-III Desktop, which was the primary family PC (amazingly, it was running XP). Then he had an absolutely antique Gateway 2000 PC in the basement running Windows 95. He would need files pulled from the both of them and put on the new desktop. This would be an all-day affair, taking much longer than I initially estimated (yes, I didn’t follow my own advice, and I attached a time expectation of 4-5 hours to the project).

I arrived at the client’s house promptly at 9:30AM. Much to my delight, he’d already begun to unbox some of the new equipment in anticipation of my arrival. My first order of business was to attach my trusty Seagate 60gb 2.5″ portable USB 2.0 hard drive to the old Dell desktop and begin copying their files to it. That took a little while, as the PC only had USB 1.1 ports on it. I was kicking myself for not bringing with a spare USB 2.0 PCI Card I had sitting in my stash at home. No matter – I could busy myself with other things while it was copying. I noticed that they were using the USB interface on their Comcast cable modem… but I shouldn’t have had a problem switching over to the Ethernet interface once I got the new HP Media Center PC set up.

The file copy from the old Dell completed, so we took it down and started to plug in the new HP Pavilion Media Center PC. The client didn’t have a Coax line splitter, which was necessary to provide feeds into both the cable modem and the TV Tuner card on the HP PC… so he ran out to a nearby Radio Shack to pick that up. Meanwhile, I was having problems with getting the ethernet interface on the cable modem to function properly. I thought that maybe since it was previously set up using USB, Comcast would have to change something on its end. Power cycling the modem and PC yielded nothing – it was simply not pushing a valid IP address to the PC. I hadn’t even started with the D-Link router setup yet, as I wanted to get the cable modem working directly attached to the PC first.

So I blew a call into Comcast support… thinking it could shake something loose from its end. I’ve had pretty good luck in the past with Comcast’s support techs – they were generally pretty quick to recognize they weren’t dealing with a novice, and didn’t have to spell out CMD and IPCONFIG for me. But this tech insisted on taking the lowest common denominator approach and was treating me like I’d never booted up a PC before. So round and round we went – ending up nowhere fast. I kept telling her that the modem wasn’t giving me a valid address, she kept having me power it off, or powering off the PC, or both. Then she said I would have to call HP because it must be a problem with the ethernet NIC. Come on! I tried multiple patch cords, and I even whipped out my trusty laptop and attached it. I told her – how could two PCs and four patch cords all be bad? Everything pointed to the ethernet interface on the cable modem being hinky. So she gave us the addresses of a couple Comcast offices in the area. It was already 12:30, so the office closing at 1PM was out of the question… but there was another office that was open until 3PM. So the client took the cable modem with him for an exchange.

I started to set up the router and OfficeJet printer at this point. I figured once we got a fully functional cable modem, I could just run through the router’s WAN setup quickly and be ready to go. The client returned shortly with a brand new Motorola Surfboard cable modem in hand. I attached it to the cable feed and plugged the ethernet directly into the new HP PC. Bam – I had a public IP address instantly, so it was a faulty modem after all! I had to run that Comcast authorization program to seal the deal – but I could tell that we were on our way.

But not so fast. Now the D-Link DI-624M router was acting goofy. I’d cloned the MAC address of the HP PC, but it wasn’t pulling an IP address from Comcast. I’ve set up dozens of D-Link routers before – why should this one act any differently? I knew the cable modem was fine, because it was working perfectly when attached directly to the PC… so what gave? I pressed the reset switch on the router for the requisite ten seconds. Now when I tried accessing the router’s Web-based setup screens, it immediately put me into a screen to update the firmware. Huh? What the *&^@#%?! So off I went to OfficeMax where I picked up a Linksys WRX200 Wireless G router. After running through its setup utility, it seemed to be OK and it pulled an IP from Comcast, and now we had a functional network and broadband connectivity.

From that point on, it was a matter of loading up Office 2003, Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2006 Internet Security, and the HP OfficeJet software on each PC. Then copy the client’s data back onto the new desktop (much faster thanks to USB 2.0). Let’s not forget to make sure that both the kids’ iTunes libraries were intact and iPods were synching properly. The time just flew by. Before I knew it, it was 8PM! But in the end, the client had “whole house” wireless coverage, three new and fully configured PCs, and a networked printer. Mr. Murphy had thrown some bad network hardware at me, but thankfully I didn’t let that stop me. Not today, Mr. Murphy, not today.

I left feeling pretty washed out, but happy that everything was finally working. The client was as nice as could be – the wife practically dragged me into the kitchen to have a sandwich and Coke at one point. They thanked me and sent me on my way with some brownies. Ah, the perks of the job!

But alas, my weekend of funky hardware was not over yet. Tune in for my next installment, titled “A Tale of Two Laptops.”

[tags]network,computer repair,comcast,murphy’s law,bad modem,new setup[/tags]