A spot of network weirdness

I couldn’t connect to any Internet sites from my Nexus 7 tablet this morning. They all gave me the “site not found” message. I did a few diagnostic tests, and found that I could connect to my router and other devices on my LAN like my network printer, but the cable modem would not respond.

So I went down and rebooted my cable modem. As an aside, why on earth do they make a network device that can’t be rebooted, and which requires that I disconnect the power cord and the backup battery to cold boot? Are on/off switches really that expensive?

That didn’t solve it, my tablet still got a “site not found” when trying for the cable modem. So I tried my iPad - and that had full access to both the cable modem and the internet. Turns out it was the Nexus 7, turning it fully off and rebooting resolved the problem.

What I don’t get is why my Nexus 7 would suddenly decide it doesn’t want to talk to my cable modem. That seemed an oddly specific problem.

Hanging onto an invalid DHCP lease.