What an evening.
My dad was having internet connection problems at his house lately. I run Starlink here in the tiny house, with child nodes over at his place — so when things go sideways, it's on us to figure it out.
The Starlink setup had been in the kitchen, wired from the window out to the dish. We decided to move the whole thing to the bathroom to get a better signal path toward his house. Dad drilled a hole through the wall so the Starlink cable could come in clean. We got everything set up, powered it on — and it just kept dropping. Over and over.
We figured Starlink might be doing some kind of data collection or signal calibration in the background, so we decided to wait it out. Two hours. While we were waiting, I finally sat down and read for a bit — The Andromeda Strain, which I just posted about. But the longer we waited, the more I started wondering what was actually going on.
Eventually we started troubleshooting for real. And the culprit? When the cable got pulled through the wall, it picked up dust and insulation debris on the port. We cleaned it out with a little alcohol, plugged everything back in, and —
Voilà. Internet.
We had been halfway convinced the modem or router had just died — and honestly, we were dreading the worst case: a full reset and reconfiguration of everything. Five nodes. That's hours of work, and neither of us wanted to deal with it. Really glad we didn't have to go that route.
Nope. It was just dust.
Whew. I'm back online now.
P.S. Here's hoping no more connection drama at his house.