h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even if it is a DHCP renewal issue (which sounds a bit like the culprit based on the evidence shown) the router should (in theory) renegotiate a DHCP address. However, that is why they have firmware updates. I would go in to your router's controlls (browser base gui or whatever) and look at it's version then look for updates to the firmware for that device. Read the release notes for that firmware release and see if there is anything that looks like your symptoms in resolved bugs.

*takes notes* 11 complained to me that she couldn't get a net connection yesterday afternoon when she got home after school. Everything did seem normal when I got home, though... *scratches head* I dislike periodical errors

Ones with a nice regular period are fine, say different phases of the moon
It's the ones with more random periods that are harder to track down I find.

Thanks guys. I will start checking when I get home tonight. I actually haven't been home in a couple days. I'm imagining that unless I'm attached directly to the router, I can't access the setup page? (for security reasons?)

about the DHCP renewal - the period sounds perfect, I'll check the log. But would that imply a corresponding change in IP address? Or maybe not necessarily?

Maybe, maybe not. If the IP address you had is not given up and in use elsewhere (shouldn't be) then you should get the same address - in dhcp the requesting device asks for the ip address is already has, the dhcp server then can tell it to use the same address or use another (can you tell I've been looking into a few issues with dhcp here ).

ahh, that clears that up, and adds substantially to my understanding. Moto bene.

Well, my free lunch from Bill Gates (see posts 271-275) is at an end, and I can no longer use my trial copy of Micros**t Office 2003. I know that I now have to uninstall said program and re-install my old version of Word, and I have a Word disc with which to do the re-installing.

My anxiety is: if I uninstall Office 2003, is there any danger of erasing the Word documents stored in my My Documents folder in the process? And should I actually remove Office 2003 *before* re-installing the old version of Word, or try to do the re-install first?

Have you been making any documents with the new version of word (2003) and saving them in that format. It may not open correctly in the older version of word (m$ are good for nice little changes in file formats between versions). If so make sure you at least save copies of the documents in the same format as your previous version. Of course this may not be needed but best check and be safe rather than having to reype (or at least reformat the documents).

Ormy, first thing I would do in to back up your documents folder to another location. While I doubt that Office will do anything to that folder, I would highly recommend that you make regular backups of important files at any rate.

Secondly, you might consider www.openoffice.org as a replacement. There is no reason why you can't have both Office and openoffice.org installed at the same time. Openoffice.org is an open source alternative to M$ Office. It's worth a tought...

Thirdly, I don't see that it should be a terrible trial to get your old version of Word back on your machine if you must use it.

Thanks, guys. But the problem there is that I'm talking about my home PC, so 'another location' isn't readily available - although I could, of course, save the stuff to disc. And I haven't got the old version of Word on my computer right now, so I can't save the new documents in that format. The 'reduced functionality' Word 2003 I have now won't let me copy anything in any case.

Sod it - I think I'm just going to have to print out the vital documents, then re-install away and hope for the best.

That seems to have gone very smoothly! I now have dear old Word 2002 back on my 'puter, all my documents have survived the transition, and I can access and edit the few documents I made using Word 2003 without any problems.

So, I fretted unnecessarily there. But thanks for the advice - I really must stop being lazy and back up my files properly, and openoffice does sound like a good idea.

"Real men don't take backups. But they cry a lot."

Forgot who said it, but there's some right to it, isn't there?

I think Marv meant that you move the real documents from the folder called 'My Documents' to a different place (eg ormys_backup_folder) on your hard disk.
You can save the documents as a different format when you do a 'save as' you can change the type of format the document is saved as, including older versions of word (back to word 2.0 for windows!) and all sorts of others (eg wordperfect, rtf - rich text format, plain text) as well.

Good idea. I've just created a backup folder and copied all my documents into it.

Phil got my drift. Whenever I am afraid that a software update might corrupt my data I copy it to another location (on a second hdd in my case) on my local machine Just In Case.

I upgraded using the *wrong* firmware. But after hitting reset several times, and power cycling, I was able to connect and upgrade using the correct firmware. The problems corrected by the firmware upgrade listed one that might apply to us. Anyway, we'll see if the problem is reduced.

Good to hear. Firmware updates are something that most consumers never head about. But in my line of work it is something that we deal with daily. People forget that network appliance sitll run their own software.

Ah another lab opened. I've just spent the morning (and half yesterday) fettling 38 macs, getting them all to the latest software upgrades, sorting out the network printer in the lab for them and now the lab is open. It's right boring going round each one and rebooting, doing the upgrades, rebooting, doing more upgrades etc till it's done, still better that than have them fall over for something that's fixed.

Phil, if it's ok to do in your environment, turn on SSH access to each of the Macs. Then sit down someplace comfy, ssh into each one in turn, and use the "sudo SoftwareUpdate" command line tool to update the Macs remotely. It nicely avoids clicking all the license agreements etc.

Marv, I just caught up with 3 weeks backlog here. Maybe you figured this out already but you'll find the transparency setting for terminal by clicking the "Terminal" menu then "Window Settings" (or typing command-shift-T) and switching to the "Color" section. Remember to click "set window defaults" if you want to keep the settings for all new windows.

Woops! I forgot to get all excited about the wiki. I always get all excited about wiki wikis. Dave, check out http://uniwakka.sourceforge.net/HomePage for a science and math oriented wiki.