Yesterday morning, when I arrived at work, I noticed that my laptop couldn’t connect to my home email server for some reason. Attempts to ping my home web server showed 90% packet loss. That’s kind of an unusual situation for a home network–I’ve had DSL go out quite a few times over the past 5 years, and I’ve had routers crash, but this is the first time that I’ve seen crippling packet loss. My best guess was that something strange had happened with a VPN that I’d set up between home and work, and that something was flinging non-rate-limited UDP or ESP packets at an insane rate.

Since 90% packet loss effects our home VoIP service as well, I had my wife hit reset on our home router/firewall PC. That fixed the unusual 90% packet loss, replacing it with 100% packet loss. When I got home last night, I found that the system had dropped into the BIOS setup screen with a “the previous boot didn’t complete right, so you probably want to change some BIOS settings” error. Grr. I changed the boot time error settings to tell it to ignore all errors, but this will probably happen the next time I need to do an emergency reboot.

Of course, it goes without saying that yesterday was the slowest day of the month, in terms of traffic to my blog. Traffic is way up this month–my average number of visits so far this month is only slightly behind the single best day from last year. My previous high was 595 hits, followed by 524 hits in second place. This month, I’m averaging around 540 hits per day, with a high of almost 800. Yeah, except for yesterday, which was barely 350.