Routers, Cables and Webcams

So last weekend, the D-Link Router I use to direct traffic to my server and six other home computers and laptop decided it was going to freeze up repeatedly.   It may have been under "attack" to some degree from some malicious user or robot zombie computers knocked up with the latest bad-warez, I really don't know at this point.   After some tweaking, I decided to try wiping the system and updating to the newest firmware (the router's "operating system") and set it all back up again (typically when updating the firmware, it cannot KEEP the old settings, which is just plain idiotic, but that's neither here nor there at this point).

After spending over two hours trying to figure out why the router was apparently not taking the new firmware properly, and/or not doing what I was telling it to do (route webcam traffic to THIS machine, route web and ftp traffic to THAT server, block websites with THESE keywords in their domain name, etc), I finally got things where they appeared to be working "enough" to make those websites I host "happy".

Unfortunately, my webcam, of all things, would not work "outside of my own computer" (no one could view it remotely).   I checked (many MANY times) the settings on the router, and they were (and are) correct.   It would not work (still won't to this very moment) but it's very low priority.

Then during the testing of the webcam, I found that my kids four computers were not able to access ANYTHING via the network (not even the server).   On a normal day, knowing that they are all on one hub (I'm cheap in that regards, but they'll never know that the hub is the slowest part of our house's network.. oh wait, they read this..) that the problem would likely be wiring related.   But given that the ROUTER had just been reconfigured and fixed, my mindset was "okay, there is something software-based that is wrong..." and so, for three days, I thought about it, tried a few things, never ever looking at the top right corner LED which was dark.. the one that links that hub to the main switch.   Apparently the cable I buried underground to the garage, shielded in a plastic tube, is bad (I verified the cables on both sides of that equation are fine).   Really dumb, since the symptoms were pretty clear -- all computers off of THAT HUB were not seeing anything!

(sigh)   Anyway, it was nice to get that done.   But, how often do you have:

• a router
• a physical cable
• and a webcam

all suddenly stop working, for apparently unrelated reasons?

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the following:

The cable went bad.   That cable leads to the router/switch, so...

The router got scrambled brains from the bad cable (crossed wires, etc), but...

The webcam is still a mystery.   I can access it locally from the host computer (http://localhost:8080) but if I try to visit it from any other computer (using the proper domain reference or even the local IP from another local computer) it times out.   I'd swear there is a firewall blocking the port to my webcam (but there is not; not Windows Firewall, not Norton..).   It's frustrating, but nice to have all working (EXCEPT the webcam).