As mentioned on the radio show last night, upon my return to the house in rural Pennsylvania, I found there is Internet connectivity trouble. Turns out, the Seagate Hard Disk Drive in the house Router, is having Read/Write Errors. This is severely interfering in my connectivity to the net today.
I arrived up here in Pennsylvania around 3:00 yesterday afternoon. Around 6:00, my son called to tel me he cannot get into the house security camera system remotely, and asked me to reboot the security Digital Video Recorder (DVR), which I did. That did NOT fix his login problem. So he remotely soft-rebooted the internal ROUTER here at the house and it rebooted -- but it didn't! Still no ability for him to login to DVR and then, I had no Internet in the house.
The way things are set up here, there is a 600 Mbps cable modem as the primary connection. Next is a CELLULAR data modem, which acts as "Fail-over 1" so that if the Router detects that the cable modem has gone down, within fifteen seconds, it re-routes all the internet traffic in the house to the Cellular data modem.
If the Cellular is also down, there are TWO separate Satellite uplinks, "SAT-1" and "Sat-2" that the Router will then switch to (one at a time) to restore connectivity.
All this is done within about fifteen seconds, this way if things fail while my radio show is actually airing, it gets back on the air within one minute at most.
None of the switchovers were happening!
So my son logs into the Router, which worked this time, and reads the Event Log. He sees "ATA Errors" which is the Hard Disk Drive. He runs a Read-Write Test and the Hard Disk starts throwing all sorts of Read-Write errors. That means it is failing badly.
Normally, we should have gotten warnings a long time ago about this, to avoid this trouble. We didn't.
So we did a Hard Reboot of the Router (holding the power button down for five to ten seconds until it turned off, then turning it back on) and that brought everything back. I was able to do the show last night.
This morning when I woke up . . . no Internet in the house again.
I did another hard reboot of the Router and got the connectivity back - at least for now.
My son ordered the two new hard disk drives, and an internal bay to mount both. They will deliver to our home in North Bergen, NJ by End-of-Business today.
He will come up here to PA either tonight or tomorrow morning to install the new drives, in a RAID configuration, so if one fails ever again, we have an automatic, internal back-up.
If, by chance, the drives DO NOT arrive by end-of-business today, he will go to a local computer store which we use regularly, and buy what is needed anyway, and still come up here either tonight or tomorrow.
So this issue will be fixed.
Whether I am able to make updates to this site today, or not, depends on whether the Router fails. Whether I am able to do a live show tonight, or not, depends on the same thing.
Just keeping you posted.
Hal
