Today we worked on improving our communications, focusing on the WebDAV, MOO, and messaging. Most of this was thwarted by a succession of power failures and network losses, but we do apparently have Internet access and WebDav runnin

Around noon, we suffered a minor internet failure. Hugh and Artemis lost connection momentarily around noon while Anthony was in the Hab attic surveying and testing pieces of equipment left by previous crews. Several UPS beeped even though there was no visible power failure. The Internet connection came back immediately for Artemis, but Musk computer and the two computers Anthony brought for the crew all stayed down.

We tried a series of different checks: examining the connection to the DirectWay (working), examining the uplink to the Internet (working) and rebooting the affected machines (no effect). Anthony then began cleaning the network area trying to expose enough of the networking to assess what was wrong.

Paul examined the system and pointed out that the wireless hub was not plugged into the DirectWay. He suggested we reconnect the wireless hub to the cable obviously hanging just free of the wireless hub. This unfortunately did not have any affect.

We tested all machines in the hab in various ways through later in the afternoon. While the connection via the DirectWay was visible and Artemis remained logged on, no other machine could connect to the Internet. No variation seemed to have any effect: we tested and reconnected all the network cables, rebooted all the machines, tried pinging, ipconfig, Network Neighborhood, and eventually were turning to Cygwin to solve the problem when we ran out of time, gave up, and waited for Paul to return.

While we were waiting, there was a power surge in the network while some electrical work was being done, causing several popping sounds and a burnt rubber odor, prompting Anthony to dash across the lab past Artemis to pull the power cables for his two laptops, Hugh's laptop and the Musk Observatory laptop. We left the laptops disconnected through the remainder of the oil change and then put the network back on line power with no visible damage.

When Paul returned, he suggested that Don take a look at it. Don and Anthony cleaned up the network area with assistance from Hugh in the Hab attic. With the core network exposed, Don could clearly see the wireless system plugged into the DirectWay. Don pointed out that these two systems were both configured to assign IP addresses and that that was the likely problem. We disconnected the wireless hub and shortly thereafter were able to log on with the Linux Habcom machine and then with one of the affected Windows machines. Our best hypothesis for how this happened is that when the wireless hub was put on the network, its attempts to assign IP addresses conflicted with the DirectWay's assignments --- but Artemis's machine was probably at a fixed point where both hubs were assigning the same address.

With this accomplished, we were able to begin to tackle some of our original task items. Anthony finished cleaning the network area and moved six binders and a large box of manuals out of his stateroom (no, I don't like computers THAT much). We successfully got onto WebDav from HabCom and were able to start instant messaging. Now that we successfully were able to access WebDAV, we planned to upload our files later that day.

However, not all went as planned. While all of this was going on, we noticed that the webcam had failed, as had the connection to Kevin's machine. After several tries at a software solution we physically re-wired Kevin's connection to the internet and found that he could get online. So either the port or the cable was bad.

This simple solution did not work for the webcam on the HabCom machine, which had stopped transmitting around the time of the initial failure. We tried restarting the browser. Rebooting. Changing the network cable. Attaching the cable to a different port. Rebooting again. Comparing Mozilla and Internet Explorer issues. And so on. Nothing changed anything: we were able to connect to the DirectWay, to see local drives, but not connect to the internet to transmit or receive.

Nothing helped: Our webcam remains down. But at least Internet and file uploads are now working!