With clear skies yesterday, our house nevertheless took two power hits yesterday. The first lasted 15 minutes, the second 11 (had to reset certain appliance clocks both times). When I tried to remote into the ThinkStation P3 Ultra this morning, RDP wouldn’t connect. So I tried pinging the host name (Tsp3Ultra2) and got “destination host unreachable.” Pretty conclusive proof that power outages mung LAN addressing, since that very string worked fine yesterday.

If Power Outages Mung LAN Addressing, Then?

For the time being I’ve got Advanced IP Scanner open, and am using the “Tools” option for each network node to call Remote Desktop Connection. That tells me which PC I’m trying to get at, and uses its IP address to make things work. Good enough for now, I guess.

I’ve observed that the name table will gradually correct itself over a 24-hour period. Since our last outage happened just before 5 PM yesterday, that means I can return to using machine names for remote access later this evening. In the meantime, I have a decent workaround.

A quick check tells me that only some PCs were affected by the outage. Not surprisingly, the laptops (kept alive by batteries durng the outage) retain their machine name-to-address relationships. The desktops and mini-PCs (except Flo6, which is on a UPS) have all been renumbered.

Here in Windows-World, it’s always something. Yesterday, it was a quick pair of power glitches. Who knows what’ll hit me today?