Sometimes I'm reminded why people are afraid of computers.
This morning I tried to turn on Genius in iTunes, and was confronted with a "network connection was reset" message. Helpful Apple, very helpful.
From the Apple forums, it looks like a common fix is to sign out of iTunes and back in again (who'd have thought). I tried this, and got the same error trying to sign into my iTunes account.
Brilliant.
Some more Googling later, and it looks like the problem might be caused by my router’s DNS settings. What the f@#k is going on?
Ok, I’ll try pointing my router at a public DNS server. Logging into my Thomson Gateway ST585 router, it doesn't look like I can do this through the fluffy web interface. Thanks PlusNet, thanks a lot.
More Googling, and I’m told I need to spin up telnet to configure my DNS settings. This isn't the sort of thing your Gran could do while watching an episode of Murder, She Wrote*.
Magically, everything now worked in iTunes-land.
I don't know what to think of all this, apart from concluding that:
- Software will always be complex (even if it seems like we are being shielded from this)
- Users can never be fully protected from the intricate mess that lies beneath a pretty interface.
On the plus side, there will always be a job for technical support staff. And what else was I going to do this morning?
* Apologies if your Gran is some kind of wiz with text-based terminal connections.
