Archive for the networking category

Aaaand the DSL is good!

Turns out it wasn’t a problem with my BSW (the wire from the brown pedestal to my house). It was with my F2 pair (the wire from the pedestal out to the big brown box on the side of the road).

The saga is over

My new friend the Bell lineman came by yesterday and found the problem. After over a month of insisting that I had a problem with the Bell wires, guess what – the problem was with the Bell wires! He swapped my line over to a spare set – hearing that nice, clear, non-fuzzy tone on […]

Still with the ongoing DSL saga…

We’re still – still! – having DSL issues. But I hope that finally we’re going to get some relief. Let’s start at the beginning: Back in February we had a new “dry” DSL line (let’s call it line #2) setup alongside our existing dial tone/DSL line (line #1). Then we cancelled all service on line […]

Guess what? The router is crap.

So apparently, the Linksys BEFSR81 router that I scored isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Two major drawbacks are going to force me to get rid of it, possibly with extreme prejudice: The QoS features of this router are useless. You can do port-based QoS, but that only deals with transfers WITHIN THE LAN. […]

Home networking is done.

Well it seems like Bell finally transfered my number over to Vonage today. I noticed because the Vonage phone was ringing more than it ever has, and there’s suddenly no voltage on the Bell line 😛 If you’re an incredible geek or just interested, this is what my home network/phone wiring looks like now.

Home network re-wire project

I drew four network diagrams before finally figuring out how I was going to hook things up at home. I really wanted something to provide QoS to the VoIP phone adapter, and ended up borrowing a Linksys wired router (BEFSR81) that does port-based QoS. Doing QoS in Linux is really, really scary, and I wasn’t […]

Collecting more information about my security system

I’ve amassed a whole lot of information about my security system over the last few days. I’m starting to feel better and better about switching to VoIP and ensuring that my system will be able to communicate. First off. my “ADT Focus 32” system is really a close of the DSC Power832, which is very […]

Getting rid of Bell: still a head-spinning exercise

The debate at home about going VoIP with Vonage for our main phone line heated back up at home yesterday. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for months, and according to our calculations we’d save $40 a month – but it has two main impediments: We use DSL for our internet connection and are not […]

Last night was quite the adventure in networking. I played Mario Kart: Double Dash in LAN mode, with my friend Jon who lives about 200km away in London, Ontario. No, we don’t have a cable that long – we used some very cool software called Warp Pipe. Warp Pipe was easy enough to setup, however […]