# thebackupbox.net outage on 2022-10-12

A thunderstorm rolled through and seems to have fried JUST the PoE injector
that my internet connection uses to power an antenna that's outside for the
point-to-point wireless connection to a tower the ISP owns.

Having woken up at 3pm and not getting my butt in gear until 6pm, I didn't
really have much choice of physical-store to buy one of these at.

Drove to the larger town where my sister lives and had her drive to the
stores she thought there might be some at. (I can drive myself, but I'm
not as familiar with the town as she is, and good excuse to hang-out.)

Checked a Best Buy, Office Depot, a Staples, and a Target, and ofc none
of them had a PoE injector. Didn't really expect them to but it was worth
a shot, and maybe they would have some router with PoE support. They did
not.

Right before giving up my sister asked her nerd-friends if they had something
and her friend said he had a Ubiquiti router that did PoE and he could unhook
it if the situation was important enough. I figured it'd be a good idea to
say it was important enough. I don't need to flake from work if I don't *HAVE*
to. So, we got there and he was in the middle of disconnecting all of the
things from this router. ._. It was *THE* router for his server rack,
although he had a handful of smaller routers to replace it with, I kind of
felt bad that he had to take it all apart.

He had said if it didn't work by just plugging the things into the
unconfigured ports to just reset the router. I asked if the config had been
saved to a computer so it could be restored, and he said it had been.
Good deal.

While driving the router home with it buckled into the front seat,
I was worried that the antenna would also be fried and I'd just have to
call my ISP anyway and the whole thing was a waste of time.

Got back and plugged it in.

Plugged the Cisco router I have doing the PPPoE into one port.
Plugged the antenna's network cable into another.

The antenna's port didn't light up at all.

I was hoping it was because it needed passive PoE manually set on the port.
I connected the hardware terminal I have to the Ubiquiti's console port,
and got a bunch of garbledy goop. I assumed it was the wrong settings for
the serial connection and poked around at those kind of randomly until I
found one that worked.

Tried to login, but the creds weren't the default, so I did a reset on
the router and logged in with the default creds.

I was presented with a root shell on a linux system. I guess these routers
use some stuff on top of Linux. After looking up how to enable the PoE
for a port, I tried the instructions and got some errors because
the instructions were for some command-line interface that wasn't a plain
shell. I checked the listening ports with netstat and saw port 23 was open,
so I telnetted to it from that shell and got an (Cisco) IOS-looking CLI.

Entered the commands to enable PoE for the port the antenna was plugged
in to.

```the commands
enabled
configure
interface 0/1
  poe opmode passive24v
  exit

exit
copy running-config startup-config
```

That last command didn't work, but I found that ubiquiti had a command
similar to the IOS command 'write' which was used to store the config.

While I was looking up how to brige ports to each other, I noticed I
got some notifications on my computer saying internet was working.

I kind of expected I was gonna have to do more, but this works better.

Instead of being up until 3am trying to get something working,
I can write a blog post about it and get to bed at a sane time.

Before I could write a blog post I had to update my DNS stuff
so people could get back on IRC and the website and stuff.

Anyway. G'night.