No SEO friendly title in my mind, there was nothing better to describe tonight’s uproar while upgrading some part of my home automation environment.
I don’t always change a running system. But when I do, I break it for sure. And of course, when I change something, I always change literally everything at once.
While following some rules strictly during my work day, such as
- never change a running system ,
- change one thing at a time and
- don’t use beta software in a production environment
I definitely forget about those rules once I am at home. Therefore, I fiddle around with my home WiFi for days, upgrading everything to IEEE 802.11n including a new full duplex repeater and new access points with exotic chipsets requiring very specific build of DD-WRT.
Still debugging slow pings, lags and randomly missing segments of my network, I also decided to upgrade my EZControl XS1 to the very latest available (beta) firmware.
Once I shut down the device in its bootloader mode, and tried to uploaded the latest firmware (via browser), the HTTP request failed and every single browser on any OS told me the page wasn’t able to be displayed. Once back to the bootloader, it told me the uploaded firmware check failed. Hitting the browsers refresh button did not help a lot either. That’s the way how you brick a $300 gadget in seconds like a boss.
As anybody would do in such a moment, I dug into my box with long forgotten network cables and picked the very only crossover cable probably exiting within the range of two hours driving. Hail to me, still owning one.
No kidding, most of todays kids won’t even know such a thing did exist. Actually, it’s the sort of cable one used long time before wireless. Before the age of switches, routers and hubs at a time when one tried to connect to machines via ethernet directly.
katha