If you’ve got a cable modem, you know the drill when it goes offline. Unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, reset your dhcp request. I’m pretty sure that [brian] mentioned this in a comment a while back, but now he’s written it up. He’s using a cron job on his linux box to check the internet connection, and if the test fails, power cycle the hardware with some X10 hardware and a little scripting. (Just don’t tell your friends or they’ll be outside trying to guess the code.)