Problems with Fedora and cable modem

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> This description is typical of a noisy or marginal quality cable. 
> I have seen this when something else is attached to the same cable, or
> when a connector on a cable end is going bad.

Seems that solution is hardware one, and thus kind of off topic.  Oh well.

After reading yours, Marc's and Michael's replies, I went to my basement 
and rechecked the cabling.  What I found was that my father in law 
disconnected the TV in the basement (we are doing some renovations 
upstairs, and he needed to move it to get access from bellow).  So one 
of the cable branches was not terminated anymore.  He did it couple of 
weeks ago (we don't use that TV much, so it went unnoticed), and I 
didn't had problems with it until couple of days ago.  I replaced 
three-way splitter with two-way splitter (so that all branches on the 
splitter are active and terminated), and now everything seems to work 
stable again.

Could it be that dead branch on the splitter affected other branches, 
and that signal quality was just barely good enough for modem (and it 
needed just a small change somewhere else to go over the edge)?

I'm not sure if this was the reason, since it seems as the things were 
starting to normalize again even before I eliminated the "dead" branch. 
  If nothing else, at least the modem will get higer quality signal now 
that it is on two-way splitter.

Or it just might be oxydation on the connector.  When I unplugged and 
plugged it again, oxydation gets scratched off.  If it starts failing 
again in couple of weeks or months, and unplugging and plugging helps, 
it might be that I need better connectors...  Gotta love troubleshooting 
without proper equipment to measure signal quality ;-)

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7