7:20 AM Troubleshooting
The first indication I had that anything was wrong was the weather.
The gray question mark icon where a tiny bank of clouds should have
been, and a readout of – ° C
suggested a curious
discontinuity. A quick glance out the window confirmed that there was,
in fact, weather and, I assumed, temperature, so I was going to have to
look somewhere else for the problem.
After several rounds of iwlist, iwconfig, and ifconfig, I was able to determine that the wireless router, a Linksys WRT56G rev 6, had freaked out, seriously. It handled wireless packets, passing them on to the wired link, and it passed the packets back from his wired link over the wireless. It appeared, healthy and as expected, on scans of local wifi nodes. It would not, though, allow new wireless nodes to associate with it, nor would it answer pings.
Basically, if a machine was already associated with the access point at the time of the out-freaking, that machine continued to work normally. Machines that needed to associate subsequently, though, got no love.
Power cycling the router did not fix the problem. I had to reset and reconfigure it. Whee!
I hope this is not an indicator of things to come.