Broadband Not-So-Funnies

The wife wished me a good night several hours ago. I've got 18% left on my laptop's battery. I've been battling networking issues as least as long as she's been asleep. ATT sent me a new DSL modem and after solving a bushel of little technical mysteries (Why wont my router pick up the IP addresses of DNS servers as provided by my ISP? Why can't I hardcode the IP addresses of DNS servers that I know to work already?) things mostly work again. My server is still doing things that make my head hurt. I can SSH into it from a math department server at school, but I can't SSH into it from within the network in my apartment. I'm too tired to come up with any more hypothesis as to what the problem could be.