"Sometimes it only takes one act of kindness to change someone's life." - Jackie Chan
I mentioned at the very end of the previous post that it looked as if the Starlink WiFi Router was maybe out of commission.
Troubleshooting of the complete failure of wired and wireless internet in our home began with a heavy and extended sigh on Christmas Day. This is not how I anticipated Christmas would go, but we do as we must. Internet service is just behind running water and electricity as a necessity at our house. Two of us are very connected in the household, and one is semi-connected.
To begin with, we have a first-generation (Gen 1) Starlink dish and WiFi router - we were part of the early beta testing, rolled out as "Better than nothing Beta" internet service in certain rural areas. I found this handy page on the Starlink website - troubleshooting by using cell phone and 4G wireless service. It explains what the lights mean on each Generation of Starlink WiFi router.
Our light was red, meaning Starlink was not connected. No surprise there... The hard-wired PC had no internet, the other WiFi routers had no internet, and the Starlink App on the phone wasn't talking to it either.
At some point I found this page about "App Says Disconnected", and followed one of the links there on how to perform a factory reset on a Gen 1 router.
"Gen 1 Router:
- Gently push the button located on the bottom of the router using an object like a paper clip.
- The light will briefly turn blue. Wait for a solid white light. The router will take a few minutes to reboot, and will interrupt your service until you set up again.
- Connect to 'STARLINK' from the list of available WiFi connections on your device.
- Once connected, you can setup your WiFi network name and password in your Starlink App settings.
- Open the Starlink App > Settings > Router > enter desired WiFi network name and password > Save."
Except the light never did briefly turn blue (step 2). It went out, then started blinking white for several minutes before turning red again. I tried the reset several times, and each time the result was the same. This behavior led me to believe that the router had failed, rather than the dish, so based on that I ordered a replacement router - which at this point is a Gen 3, and while it is backward-compatible to the dish, it's not exactly a plug-in replacement.
The Gen 3 Router arrived on the doorstep yesterday, and after work I began eating the "get the internet working again" sh*t sandwich.
For some reason, the Gen 3 router is completely weatherproof. It arrived with specialized connectors that get shoved into deep oval-shaped sockets in the router body, with ribbed weather seals on the cables. I'm not sure why this is weatherproof, as most routers are usually kept indoors...
Our Gen 1 cable connectors have massive retaining clips on them, and these would not fit into the sockets on the router body. Our connectors identical to the ones below:
Square peg, round hole sort of issue with the data cables. I suppose that the Gen 1 connectors could have been sanded down to fit, but I figured there must be a less drastic fix.
At some point long ago I had purchased a "High Speed Ethernet Switch" that I'd never used - it was still in the shrink-wrapped box out in the shop. I figured that maybe it would be possible to plug my square cable into the Ethernet Switch, and plug in the fancy new weatherproof cable into a different port on the switch.
Then the other end of the fancy weatherproof cable could plug into the Gen 3 router. This turned out to be a correct guess, but it took a long time for Starlink to begin working again - and I was about to despair and order a replacement dish.
Anyway here are some pictures of the mess.
Below: Gen 1 router front. No light at the pin-hole because it's out of the circuit.
Below: Gen 1 router back. Dish signal in and Ethernet out. Way back when we first got Starlink, I plugged the Ethernet output from the Gen 1 Starlink Router into the house Ethernet network, so all the data ports in the house are live - then plugged in a WiFi router in the basement and more recently, ran a cable for a second WiFi router out to the shop.
Here's the arrangement as it sits right now - extension cord, a couple of power supplies for the switch and the Starlink router, ethernet cables everywhere... but hey it's working! No point hiding the cables until you are sure that it's going to work, right? You might just have to dig them out again. I should be able to replace the network switch with an ethernet coupler, because all the switch is doing is connecting two cables together.
It took me a while to find the Ethernet output jacks on the new router. They were well hidden behind a rubber weatherproof plug as well. That would be the gray cable leading off to the right in the image below.
The front does nothing functionally - it just sits there and looks kind of minimalist cool.
The drama wasn't quite over with though. Once it began communicating with the dish, the other two routers (basement, shop) began working again. However the Starlink Router Network needed to be renamed and have a password set. This was easily done using the phone app.
I joked with the wife that our new WiFi network should be named "FBI surveillance van #26827", to mess with neighbors who might see the WiFi signal on their cell phones, but she was not amused, so it's something much more mundane. :( I reluctantly gave the new Network the same name and password that the old Gen 1 router had.
The desktop PC was not happy with this Network and Router substitution. I tried a PC reboot, but it simply would not speak with the new router. I finally had to perform a Network Adapter Reset on the PC, and eventually it showed that it had internet service once again. Quite a bit of flailing for a smoked router, but here we are.
I'm putting this out here on New Year's Eve, and so would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year, and (fingers crossed) that mine will be much better than last year :)
Cheers to all!
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