IT WAS THE DYNAMIC HOST CONFIGURATION PROTOCOL

I’m back.  It was a fraught 24 hours.

First resource was my 3rivers techies, several shifts of them.  Then it was the MAC techies in California.  And then the “legacy” MAC techies and finally the eMAC techies.  One woman exclaimed (heartfelt),  “Oh, I just LOVE eMacs!”  I write their names down as I go.  (They have a ticket number identifying my prob and me.)  Monica, Kyle, Beaufort, Thomas, Jacob, Kimberly, Shane, Lyndell, Andrew, Shayna, Noland, et al. 

First suggestion:  unplug everything (not just turn it off), leave it for an hour and come back.  That worked the first time but never again.
Second suggestion:  You must replace your phone connection line.
Third suggestion:  You must replace your splitter.
Fourth:   You must replace your ethernet connector.
Fifth:  You will have to pay the $50 fee for real help from MAC. 
Sixth:  (a techie who spent time in Heart Butte)  “We’d better smudge.”  Actually that was my idea, but it made him laugh because he knew what I meant.

The symptom was that I’d gone offline from my provider (3rivers) and could not get back on.    I waited until Monday morning to get the new phone line, but had to drive to Conrad (thirty miles away) to get the new splitter and ethernet connector.  None of this made a difference.  $25 gone up in smoke.

The computer has some self-contained diagnostics and guides which I read and stepped through over and over.  Gradually I began to understand that 3rivers uses a form of connection called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).  I think this means that instead of having an assigned server, you are moved back and forth as traffic demands.  I accused my provider of bumping me off entirely in order to make more room for other people, since I typically couldn’t get on between 3PM and 11PM, but could at other times.  They heatedly denied this as it is against the law.  Some techies (not 3rivers) agreed they could and did. 

One problem was so deep into the process that no one but the eMAC legacy guy knew what to do.  It was about locking and unlocking changes.  He was able to address it only because of the constant exchange of such information among dedicated techies which continues on line, at beer blasts, in libraries, and so on in the constant buzzy process of interacting with the Internet in the most specific tiny ways.  Most people endorse free sharing and even the techies recommended the online support communities:  apple.com/support and apple.com/discussions.  I’m sure there are forums specifically for eMAC.  But one techie (local) stubbornly insisted that he could not and would not help me unless I spent the $50 bucks for MAC to explain what was wrong with my DHCP.

In the end it turned out to be code corrosion -- that is, my DHCP operating software had lost potency.  A reinstall did the job.  Andrew, who is the lead techie at 3rivers, suggested it.  I had already reinstalled the applications, which didn’t work.  So about midnight last night I was back on line.

Then there were two probs left.  The first was the pile-up of unread emails -- I get a LOT of them, mostly automated, and I’m careful to at least glance at them unless I really KNOW I don’t want to read them.  I wish I’d known to delete one in the avalanche: it was a personal attack from an academic so unreasonable that I wondered a) if this were really from the purported source and 2) whether he had developed a brain tumor.  (It contained atypical grammatical errors.)

The other prob or issue or whatever is wondering how my DHCP had gotten so corrupted.  Did a hacker simply delete it?  Did I use it so often I wore it out?  Should I do something to prevent future probs?  (If it WERE a hacker, I could name some suspects.)  Should I change my security settings?  Already Target says I’m too secure for them to deal with -- I block their cookies.)  But I know from experience that codes DO get corrupted.  The first remedy for everything is to reboot, and the second is to reinstall.

In the spirit of sharing, I pass all this on.  But it is not digested yet.

I keep remembering a January long ago when my father-in-law was hospitalized miles away and our phone was shut off for nonpayment, because Bob stubbornly insisted on paying his bills once a month, regardless of when they came in.  This did not mesh very well with the new phone company manager.  We really needed that phone ON, so I set out to get ‘er done.  I called the local office.  She could do nothing.  I asked for the boss’s name.  He answered in his office but he said he could do nothing.  I asked for HIS boss’s name, some place back east, but he would not answer his phone.  I went to the company receptionist and asked HIS boss’s name.  He couldn’t be reached because he was vacationing in Hawaii.  I invented a ruse for calling him at his resort in Hawaii.  He answered.  I explained.  Ten minutes later the phone was turned back on. 

They CAN reach into your computer, particularly an eMAC, which is designed for that.

I remembered another incident back there in the past when Joe Davis, an old cowboy friend of ours, got so incensed with his phone that he ripped it out of the wall, took it down to the phone office (it was closed), smashed it up enough to feed it through the letter slot and never had another phone again.

But I really LOVE my eMAC!