Well, not really. If I were truly a god, it would not have taken this long.

It has been a long and winding road. This ordeal with my router. It died one night. Since then, I have attempted to replace it on three separate occasions. The most recent attempt was to be the last attempt. And it was. But I followed up on a lead from the guy I bought the last [bad] router from, who said there was a Yahoo! group about this router, so I dug it up. One of the first messages I read there was that the moderator of the group was thinking of shutting the group down, since he no longer had that model router.

But then I stumbled upon a message that mentioned a hardware reset. For some [monumentally stupid] reason, this hardware reset method is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation that came with the router. If it was, it would have saved me a lot of time and money. I have probably thrown $50 at this stupid problem, and wasted a ton of time. This does not make me happy.

But what I am happy about is that I tried this little hardware reset trick - which involves shorting pins 3 and 8 together on the COM port and turning the unit on and waiting for the ready light to blink 8 times - and I managed to bring my original router back to life! WOO HOO! Now everything is back to the original configuration - original router at the DSL modem, and my old LinkSys hub at the linux box. And everything is just humming right along.

Yes, my last attempt to replace the router was the final attempt. It did not want to be replaced. It was not destined to be replaced. It's destiny, after all, was to be resurrected. This concludes the act in the center ring.

This way to the egress.