iMac G5 2 GHz (Ambient Light Sensor) has been our main machine for the past two and a half years. We have whipped it and made it compress close to a thousand QuickTime and Flash videos. Life is never easy for this iMac. We expected that its life expectancy would be short. So we thought the zero day would come pretty soon.

In the meantime, we use an external FireWire hard disk drive to back up files while the internal drive only contains Mac OS and application files. In this way, we can access important files even when our iMac dies.

Screenshot 1 – Network Status

Screenshot 2 – Network Configurations

Day 1

Something unexpected happened yesterday. Suddenly, our iMac refused to connect the Internet. Checking on the Network Status, the light was yellow as opposed to green. (See Screenshot 01.) Instead of 192.168.0.10, the local IP address was shown as 169.254.220.4, according to the Network preference pane (See Screenshot 02.), which could be traced to a private layer through nLayer Communications, an Internet service provider in Illinois, USA. Hmm, bizarre… I could manually enter the local IP address. In fact, the the color of the network status turned into green by doing so except that iMac continued to refuse to connect the Internet.  Continue reading →