Ugh, I did the same thing in Austin two years ago (except mine was $350 and came with a sad little tote bag). The truth is most of those weekend certs are just paper mills, the real learning happens when you get a cheap practice head and grind through 50 faces, angles and pressure you figure out with your hands not a workbook. Skip the next class and put that money toward a convention where you can actually watch people work up close.

Bought myself a fancy drysuit once, brand new, top of the line. Spent the whole first dive fighting the zipper and ended up doing a weird crab walk back to the truck. My beat-up old suit from a garage sale still hangs in my garage, dry as a bone. Sometimes the fancy stuff just ain't worth the hassle.

Dude yes, DNS is the thing I always blame last and it's like always the actual problem. Did the exact same thing at a library once, spent an hour checking switches and cables before I finally looked at what the DHCP was pushing out. Their router had a static entry pointing to an old server from like 2015, just sitting there broken.