We had no fixed agenda for today and I’d been up past midnight dealing with my home Internet problems, so we slept in until the sun woke us. We had a leisurely breakfast, did more laundry, edited a few photos, and finally left the AirBnB around 11:30am.

The walk into town is about 15-20 minutes; it takes longer if you stop and look at the beautiful scenery, which we did. Plage du Bestoutan is the closest beach to our AirBnB, and it seems to be very popular, even on a normal work day.

We reached town in plenty of time to visit the market and then had a very nice sea bass lunch at Brasserie Le Cendrillon just off the beach, followed by very good gelato from L’Artisan Glacier while we waited for the Tourist Office to reopen.

But on our way to the Tourist Office, we happened to see the ticket booth for boat tours to the calanques; a one-hour tour to the first three calanques was leaving in just a few minutes, so we bought our tickets and hopped aboard.

After we passed Plage du Bestotan, we were in uncharted territory; the Captain narrated the trip, but in French, so we didn’t really know where we were much of the time.

We reached Calanque de Port-Miou about 15 minutes into the trip.

We sailed around Pointe de la Cacau on the way to the second calanque, Calanque de Port Pin.

Calanque d’en Vau was our final calanque for the trip; it had a big crowd on the beach, rocks, and in the water. It even had cliff divers!

We returned to the harbor and wandered around for a few minutes, then we went back to our AirBnB to rest and cool off.

We didn’t stay long, though; we wanted to see Port-Miou again, and its entrance is only a 15 minute walk from the AirBnb. We could see the harbor from the road into the park.

We were among the very few people going into the park at 6pm – there was a big crowd leaving. We walked around for a few minutes and decided to come back when we’d have more time (and energy) to explore.

We were ready for dinner and had leftover pizza from yesterday and an oven. But the manual for the oven was only in French and Italian, the display on the oven was in French, and there wasn’t anything obvious like a “heat” button. It took a couple of tries, but I found the manual for the UK version of the oven, which let me navigate the oven’s menu system and reheat the pizza…which was much better yesterday. Just as we were closing the oven door after taking out the last of the pizza, the power went out in the kitchen! I called our host who told me that they were having problems with the breaker for the oven and couldn’t figure out what was doing it; he told me where the breaker was and I reset it. Then I tried opening and closing the oven door again…and the lights went out again. I reset the breaker again so we could have lights in the kitchen; I don’t plan to do any more oven debugging here.

I was up too late last night to post my usual blog entry because I was desperately trying to get Internet working at home.

The problem started on Sunday night (11pm here in France, about 2pm at home). I send all my photos home for safekeeping whenever I have enough bandwidth; it took a while to get a working procedure, but now all I have to do is issue one command and everything gets copied to my desktop machine at home, which then gets backed up to Backblaze. Except that on Sunday, the backup stopped working halfway through.

A few minutes later, I started getting notifications from various services like iCloud and Ting that the house was “offline”. Frontier (our ISP) didn’t report any problems, though. It was late, and I decided to look at it on Monday.

Things were still broken on Monday morning. I asked my housesitter to take photos of the ONT (fiber modem), Ubiquiti USG router, and the Eero that Frontier included that I’m using in “bypass mode” to run the house WiFi. The Eero showed a red light (as I expected); the ONT was normal; but the Ubiquiti router had no lights on it at all – it was dead, dead, dead.

Some quick research told me that the problem with the router might be fixable, but the simplest possible solution would require re-flashing the EPROM on the router; this didn’t seem viable.

On to Plan B – take the Ubiquiti router out of the loop and connect the fiber modem directly to the Eero. I’d tried doing that when we first switched to fiber; it worked, but the Eero didn’t let me assign DNS names to local machines, and that was a pain, so I kept using the Ubiquiti router and put the Eero behind it as a dumb access point.

I still had the Eero app on my phone; I told it to put the Eero back into normal mode so it could do all of the routing for the house. Nothing happened, of course, but it didn’t give me any error messages, so I asked my housesitter to change the cabling and power cycle the Eero. A few minutes later, I started getting notifications that services were coming back online! The Eero had gone back to normal mode, and I had Internet at home. I was able to send my photos home, and all was well.

Not really. A few devices had given up the ghost when they couldn’t reach the Internet for a couple of days; I was able to get my housesitter to powercycle the most critical devices, but there are a few that will have to wait for my return. And I had to change some scripts and configuration files to use machinename.local instead of machinename or machinename.d2j.us; in one case, I had to hardcode the internal IP address of a device to make things work. I will still have a good bit of configuration cleanup to do when I get home.

And that brings me to a question – now that I’ve worked around the Eero goofiness for the most part, do I even need to replace the Ubiquiti router? Having one fewer device in the critical path seems like a good idea, and it’d save me a few hundred dollars. Decisions, decisions….