So last night I had my entire network setup and I was trying to setup port forwarding to use WOL on my server (thanks again for that
@rdsok). Pretty simple stuff, right? I thought so too.
This was on one of the higher end Netgear routers with dual 5g blah blah, you know... Well, right before I was going to bed, the router rebooted out of nowhere. I tried and tried and absolutely could not get it to connect back to the internet. after messing with it for a while, I found out it reset itself to factory defaults!!! What the hell. So I set it all up again, thankfully I remembered everything, and it did it again about 30 minutes later... Okay, this is getting annoying. Screw it, I'm tired, I'm going to sleep.
I wake up today hoping everything is fine, I get on my desktop (I was on the lappy last night) and I go in and assign one port for WOL to get everything going again and boom, it power cycles and no more internet. I do this about 4 more times trying different things including not messing with NAT (had to so something with that, can't remember what though), I tried not doing the port forwarding, I tried setting custom forwarding, noting worked, it kept reverting to default. Screw it, I'm getting my Asus router back. The good ole AC3100!!!
The wife got off work early, we jumped in the car and headed to Best Buy. I was about half way there when I realized what day it was.... I'm going to Best Buy on FRIGGIN BLACK FRIDAY!!!! Oh yea, this was a fantastic idea.
We pulled in the parking lot and I have never seen it so busy there in my life. We had to park way out in the back 9 somewhere and walk quite a ways to get in there. I get in there and hold the box up to the dude at the door and he looks at me like I'm an idiot. I tell him it's an exchange and he looks confused. I finally get my little sticker (so dumb) and I head to the CS desk where I'm met by someone that is, to put it lightly, extremely flamboyant. I'm not homophobic or anything like that, but this dude was OVER THE TOP!!! Quite the excitement for the day lol.
So when we got to the counter I had the wife wait in line while I went to the back and checked if they had my Asus router. Thankfully, those were not on sale (I have a warranty lol) so there was 2 on the shelf. I picked up one of them and went back to the counter where we did the exchange. I'm telling you, his lisp was so thick I could not hardly understand him. It was bad. Finally I get it exchanged and I tell him I want a bag and he says yes (and yes, I'm assuming his gender. The beard gives that away!!!). He takes the box, removes the spiderman twine that is wrapped around the box and hands the box back to me and says "THANKS! HAVE A FABULOUS DAY!!"... Um dude, I said I wanted a bag.... Yea...
So I get everything done there and I decide to head to the back and look at some laptops since mine is on its last leg and of course the only thing that is on sale is absolutely craptastic. I guess you could run an emulator on it or something, but for what I need it for, um NO. So I start walking around and I end up in the keyboard isle and I see they have a metric crap ton of the "Wave" keyboards and they are marked 50% off. I actually need a keyboard, I have needed one for quite a few years now, I just never could find one that I liked. I figured for this price, I would give it a try. so I had to the register in the back (no way I'm going to the front, screw that mile long line lol) and I check out. I tell him that I need a larger bag than what flamboyant boy gave me and he says that's the largest they have. LIAR!!!!!! Whatever, take my money and I'm out.
I get home and I start setting the new router up and guess what, it powercycles and internet goes away... F-ME!!! I kept refreshing for a while (this was after the initial setup of course) and internet came back so I started working. First, I had to get my grandmas house back online which I did. Not sure what was happening, but changing the ssid seemed to resolve the issue. Speaking of that, I just remembered I never removed the guest network that I had to setup just to have access to that bridge... oops. It was the only ssid and password I had that was of the old versions lol. So that is gone just in case someone is messing with me.
So internet is good here and next door, lets try that good ole port forwarding. Let me tell you, it is so much easier in Asus' dashboard than it is in Netgears. I set the name, the internal IP, the incoming and local port, and clicked add. Done. I pulled up my little "Magic Packet" program and sent out a wake up call over the internet and one second later I hear the fans on that server kick on. Oh hell yea!!!
The whole reason I wanted this (on the Netgear mind you) is because that router would NOT allow me to connect my 8TB drive to the USB3 port to act like a NAS. So I was going to use the server to put the drive into and when I was out on the road and need a file or something, I could just send a wake up call and turn it on and I could get what I need. Well, now that I have the Asus router back, I can just hook it up to the USB3 port and set my ddns url which should still be good from the last router and call it good. But I still would like to have access to the files on that server if I need then.
This is also allowing me to clean up some of the files on that 8TB drive. I ran (actually, I'm still running it) a program called Duplicate File Deleter from the windows store to clean up a lot of the files. You see, the files on that drive are files I have collected ever since I had my first computer. There are a TON of them. But, when I would change computers, I would put files into a folder called something like "old_lappy_celeron.old" or something like that and I would only take out files that I actually needed. But back then, I would just copy the files rather than move them. So there were a lot of duplicate files. But I had no idea how many.
This is the second time I'm running this program on this drive. I ran it yesterday and it took about 15 hours to complete, but I screwed up. Not only did I check the box to delete folders that became empty after deleting duplicate files, but I also checked the "send deleted files to recycle bin". Um, I have a 1TB SSD in my computer and I'm deleting files from an 8TB HDD... Guess what, my computer didn't like that. In fact, it filled up the drive, confused the computer, the computer signed out of windows and took me back to the login screen and when I signed in again, all was for nothing. Well, my recycle bin was full lol. But the weirdest thing is before it logged out, it turned off the signal to my right and left monitors but kept the center monitor on... Weird...
So yea that pissed me off a little bit lol. But when it was all said and done, I had over 220,000 duplicate files!!! Holy Hell!!! I didn't think it was that bad lol.
So today when I woke up I started the process over again, but this time I'm ONLY checking the box to delete empty file folders. I know I'm going to lose some stuff that I would really like to keep, but going through over 220k files to make sure every single one of them is worth deleting is just a waste of time IMO. That would take me days to do. And I would probably never miss what is on that drive to be quite honest, it would just suck to lose it all at once.
So yea, that has been my day. Not a fun one if you ask me.
