Monday, February 23, 2009

Coffee shop Internet problem

So, I have this thing where I hate staying inside the house for days at a time while I work and do my little thing all in a small space. I need to get OUT. I need to have the hubbub of people around me while I do my thing. (Note, not the hubbub of people who want me to pay attention to them. Just the hubbub of people who are doing their own thing while I do mine.) But something odd has happened to me two days in a row.

I get to Aroma, sit down with my coffee, boot into Ubuntu 8.10 and start to work. After a couple of hours, my Internet just dies. I try to log back into the Wireless connection, check my ip address. Request a new one. Fiddle and fuss, but nothing. I can ping the coffee shop's Internet gateway, but I can't see anything on the other side of it.

Logically, I thought that there was maybe a time limit on how long you can use the Internet connection here, that it recognized my MAC address or something and blocked me for the rest of the day. I dunno. But, on a lark, today I tried to log back into the network on the Windows partition. And it worked. Not only that, but it never died again.

Anyone got any ideas what's happening here?

2 comments:

jzacsh said...

were those 2 days the last time that happened in Ubuntu? Did you ever figure out what was wrong?

Lisha said...

I never did figure out what was wrong. It happened fairly frequently, though. In the end I just switched to Windows or left that coffee shop when I lost connectivity.