Weird Fixes No.1

Welcome to the first installment of this series where I outline some of the weirdest fixes I've come across while working in IT. A brief overview as to format: I like to outline the problem and solution right at the top of the blog post because it's easier for someone to read and find the solution to reproduce on their own. To kick-off this series, I'm going to outline an issue I like to call:

A Study In Green

I've been reading Sherlock Holmes novels lately and the Amplifi Alien Router, has a green light, don't judge.

The Problem

Anyway, I was working with an Amplifi Alien home router one day and when using the built-in speed test, the speed was around 20Mb/s down and up. What made this strange was that the internet line was a 1Gb/s up and down fiberoptic service and the router was getting those speeds before. Now when performing the speed test, the LCD screen displays the location of the router and it was displaying the location as being in Africa (the router was located in California, USA). Now when using the Ookla SpeedTest app, it showed the location as London, England.

The Solution

Get a new IP address from my ISP

The Explanation

First some background. There is something called IP-based Geolocation which is the mapping of an IP address to a real-world location. Now, when running a speed test, (be it the built-in tool in the router or the speedtest app) the device needs to reach out to a server to run the test and naturally the best way to test is to use the closest and part of the determination of which server is selected (as best as I can tell) is done with Geolocation.

Now at this particular location I was troubleshooting, the ISP had just recently installed brand new service and the IPs were brand new (well, to the area anyway) so the Geolocation service these speed tests used were not updated yet. So I got on a support chat with the ISP and asked them for a new IP address. To my absolute surprise the support agent said ok with no questions asked, then he did his part and I rebooted the ONT and get a new one via DHCP. I choose to believe he really did something on his end because I had already rebooted twice (or thrice) and hadn't gotten one...could I have kept trying without reaching out to support, yes, but I didn't and anyway it worked.

Once it came back up with a new public IP, I ran a speed test again and everything was normal both on the internal router and speed test app.

Conclusion

That's it! Hope this helps someone out there and/or helps someone learn something new in tech.