I've noticed my home connection to the Internet has been dropping packets lately. I assumed the problem was my wi-fi gateway (wi-fi is cheaper than drilling holes in the floor, you see.) So I moved antennas around, added parabolic reflectors made of paper and aluminum foil, and hopped channels, but nothing improved the 20% packet loss rate. I started searching online for a better wireless router.

Then it occurred to me to ping the router itself. No lost packets whatsoever. I had been pinging a computer connected to the router! Oops. Ok, so the wireless connection is in perfect shape.

The problem turned out to be the tiny router that performs network address translation (NAT) to connect my small home network with the rest of the world. It's apparently not fast enough to handle the translation load it's getting, so it gives up sometimes. NAT has always bothered me because it complicates the design of the Internet. Now it bothers me because I need a faster router. I want IPv6!

Oh well, I guess I brought this upon myself. My sister Shelly has been putting up big web sites with lots of media files, and my server hosts it all. I love all the work she's doing. She creates amazing fan sites and family sites. She even has a site about her dancing and other things she likes to do. (BTW, she's available for hire as a web designer! Email me.)