Gaff:
It's too bad she won't live! But then
again, who does?
Blade Runner (1982)
Dominic
Vautier
posted 8-2022
The very first day that I went to work for Tektronix the DP manager looked me straight in the eye and said "Look, I don't want you going around kicking sleeping dogs." In short if it's not broken don't fix it. Well as it turned out a lot of stuff at that company was sort of broken so it was not a clear decision to make, especially when you have a lot of partly sleeping dogs, but it was a good rule to follow anyway.
So this is what led me to my latest travail. I have a fairly standard setup for internet and cable TV, and since the technology changes so fast I decided to pull a lot of cable and cat5 (as my brother used to say). In fact each room in the house is wired at least in two places for cable and internet. In the future we may not need wires but you never can tell and it's a lot easier to pull cat5 when there's no wall.
I rent the modem from the vendor since incompatibility is often an issue. Briefly describing this, the cable comes into a modem that supports TV, internet and hard line phone. The TV feed goes to a TV hub which connects to a big box and several baby boxes forming a net. These boxes all run TVs. On the other side of the system the modem feeds a router and hub which can connect up to 8 cat5 lines. The router is also a hot zone.
So my big box started acting up and continually wanted a reboot. After much frustration I got a replacement big box. Then none of the baby boxes would connect to the big box. After much consultation with the vendor she was able to fix the problem. "What did you do?" I asked. She said "I reset your modem."
So
the sleeping dog theory got me. I should have listened to this
little voice in the back of my head that kept whispering "when in
doubt reset the modem, reset the modem." I had analyzed it and
supposed that since internet was working fine I may have believed that
resetting the modem could just wake up another sleeping dog. Wrong.