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….

We decided to take it easy today and follow Rick Steves’ tour route through Aix; it’s all inside the city (half inside the old walls, and half outside). We also had a lunch date scheduled with our friends from Shir Hadash at home, Kevin and Denise, who are here for a three-week “Living In France” Smithsonian tour.

Naturally, we started the day in search of breakfast. We had croissants, bread, orange juice, and a hot drink at Nino Café on the Cours Mirabeau. Everything was fine except that even though I thought I’d ordered an Americano, they gave me a small expresso, and I felt deprived. We found a solution, though – a nearby Starbucks, where the coffee and tea came in BIG mugs (and the barista was American).

Rick Steves’ tour started at La Rotonde (the fountain near the Tourist Office); I noticed an anachronistic addition to the statue that I’d missed yesterday.

There weren’t many tourists out early in the morning, so Diane was able to pay her respects to Cezanne without being photobombed.

Thursday is France’s national day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide of 1915; Aix has a permanent statue near the Tourist Office to commemorate the genocide.

The tour took us down the shady side of the Cours Mirabeau, and we saw the companion statue to the one for Arts and Sciences that we’d seen yesterday.

One of the few places that was open today was the Caumont Center d’Art in the Mazarin Quarter; they’re between exhibitions, but they did have one piece from the upcoming event in their courtyard.

We stopped (again) at the Fountain of the Four Dolphins on our way back to our hotel.

Kevin had suggested we meet them at the most appropriate possible place for Silicon Valley dwellers – le Marche de Pomme. We all stayed outside, though.

They’d made reservations for the four of us at a lovely small restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, La Brocherie. The food was delicious, as was the wine, and the company was excellent.

After lunch, we resumed our tour, returning to the Cours Mirabeau to visit Good King René, the final king of Provence before it became part of France.

We continued onward to the square containing the Palais of Justice and the Église de la Madeline, then further to the Place d’Albertas and Place Hôtel de Ville.

Rick Steves’ tour ended at the Cathedral of Saint-Sauveur, where they had just finished with Easter celebrations and were getting ready for a special event marking the death of Pope Francis earlier today, so parts of the Cathedral were closed in preparation. It’s a very large cathedral, built up over many centuries, with many architectural styles visible.

We weren’t quite ready to go back to our hotel, so we stopped in the Museum of Tapestries (one of the few other museums open today).

When we were almost back to the hotel, we finally had a chance to visit our neighborhood church, Saint-Jean-de-Malte; when we’d tried before, either the doors were closed or they were holding services.

Kevin and Denise had praised another restaurant they’d found, Le Petit Verdot, so we went there for dinner – it was a couple of blocks from the Cathedral, but that was OK…we need the exercise! We’d made reservations for 7pm and were the first people there, but the place was nearly full half-an-hour later. It was delicious and reasonably priced; the waitress was even kind enough to let me confirm that we had a reservation and give her my name in French before switching to English. :-)