COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

I've been experiencing one of those occasional annoying glitches that plague us sometimes. I was having intermittent drop-outs when I was typing. I think I found the reason this morning. This relatively new Logitech keyboard has an on/off switch and I've found that if I switch it off and back on again it solves the problem. Must be an imperfect connection if the slider switch is not firmly pushed over. We live and learn.....

[Pluggy]

Just one of the myriad of reasons not to have keyboards with batteries in 'em.

[PanBiker]

Fibre enabling day today, time to install the new router. I'll set it up and change the default SID for the wireless interface. I can give it the same name and secure password as exists on the ADSL router. I'm hoping the family mobiles and tablets are smart enough to re-negotiate their own IP's given the same existing credentials. I noticed that the host address for the router is on a different network, it will be sourced from a different router pool in the infrastructure. We'll see how smart these devices really are.

[PanBiker]

Smart enough, the laptop logged out of One Guy when I disconnected the old router as to be expected but had no problem reconnecting via wireless. I logged into the router on my main machines wired connection and changed the settings for the wireless to the already learned settings the various devices hold. Two mobiles and a tablet have renegotiated their IP's and host network. It will hold good for when the kids and the rest of the family come visiting with their tri-quarters (sorry, mobiles). Painless installation, didn't need the instructions. Network feed still at 19mbps but my go live date is up to midnight tonight.

[PanBiker]

Just logged back on after about a 20 minute downtime on the line. Router now reports line standard as VDSL2 and a downstream line rate of 40Mbps, upstream 2Mbps after re-initialisation.

[Stanley]

Enjoy it Ian......
David, stop buying phones!

[PanBiker]

I have moved all the mobile phone posts here

Mobile Phones

[Big Kev]

I was tempted by the £5 a month fibre offer from Sky but it's capped at 25GB a month. I'll wait until they offer the unlimited for the same price. I'm sure they're restricting upload speeds to push people to fibre though. I have 1.2mbps available on my adsl but only get 500kbps at best despite them "retraining" the line. Downloadavailability is over 20mbps, actual is around 19mbps, which is pretty good for a 17mbps service.

[Stanley]

I'm sure you are right Kev about upload speeds, even on 40mps fibre it is sub 2mps. Sending 200mb publication files to Lulu when I was publishing my books was painful. I doubt it would be much better now.

[Stanley]

I may have cracked the keyboard fault that has been plaguing me of late with drop-outs when typing. It was particularly bad this morning first thing so I took the batteries out and dressed both ends with fine emery cloth. No drop-outs since.....

[Tizer]

How about this for fast broadband at £21.70 a month including line rental? 319 Mbps download and 243Mbps upload. It's a joint experiment between Talktalk, Sky and Cityfibre in York to show that BT Openreach is wrong to claim that fibre into the home is too expensive: LINK

[PanBiker]

10 years ago I provisioned 100Mb broadband into the former Barden High School buildings. I was Network Manager during the BSF project running in Burnley and we occupied the vacated High School buildings during the transition phase into the new build of Thomas Whitham Sixth Form. The 100Mb fibre came via the spare capacity due to low uptake on the Nynex but then Virgin TV infrastructure. I had to upgrade all the existing cabling and switches to facilitate the upgrade. It allowed us to have Cisco wireless flooding as an integral part of the infrastructure as well. It worked well for the two years we were in the building.

[PanBiker]

A bit of interesting but useless information unless there was a problem. I have just rebooted my router as my fibre connection should have settled down now since installation. While I was in the settings I did a traceroute to the site and find that it is 11 hops from my router over to OneGuy on the host servers in Germany completed in 41ms for the round trip.

[Stanley]

What a good job we don't have to do it manually!

[Stanley]

I'd like to know why Talktalk SMTP is refusing to deliver an email on the grounds it is querying an address which is perfectly good and used frequently....

[PanBiker]

Is it a named SMTP server where it's failing Stanley? What happens if you do a loop test on your mail.

[PanBiker]

Here is a tip for anyone who has upgraded to Windows 10 and find themselves with erratic or no WiFi connection. There is a fault in the W10 upgrade process if upgrading over some prior versions of Widows. I had this problem and tried a few of the searched Google fixes including upgrading or reinstalling drivers and an odd registry hack all to no avail on my particular setup. The problem on mine came down to Windows powering down the wireless network interface in my laptop when the machine went into sleep mode. You could wake up the machine but it disabled the WiFi connection even though it still showed it connected. Running the built in diagnostics fixed the connectivity reporting that a network cable was unplugged despite this not being possible with an integrated wireless network card.

Delving into the settings via device manager revealed that on the power management settings of the card, Widows sets the default to power the card off when not in use. Clearing this has sorted the intermittent drop of connectivity. Screen shot below shows where you need to look if you have similar problems. I will live with the minuscule extra power consumption, OK I suppose if the OS is running on a mobile phone but not really necessary when deployed on a laptop.

[Stanley]

Ian, I don't know what a loop test is. I have done my own version and got two daughters to try the address, they will report back today. Oh, it's the Talktalk SMPT server that is chucking me out. Janet is in the middle of major refurb of their new house and it wouldn't surprise me if they have temporarily lost their connection.

[PanBiker]

A loop test is just when you email yourself to test basic functionality of the mail server.

If your existing problem is a single failure of an address it is more likely a server or client further down the line. You get the message regarding the fault though from your own ISP's server as that is the reporting server. If all your other mail is working it will not be the TalkTalk server at fault, try the loop, if it works, your end is fine.

[Stanley]

Ian, I rang Talktalk and whatever they did solved the problem with Janet's address, mails going out OK now.
As for the connectivity problem with the TV. Big Kev came round and I went through everything I had been doing with him, all was fine until I got to putting the password in which is where I have always run into a brick wall. He kindly pointed out that I should be using capitals instead of lower case so I switched and popped the password in. It worked straight away..... The man is a genius and very kind, he didn't immediately burst out laughing, he waited until he had got up the street! Just think what an unscrupulous repair man could have charged for that! I can now watch Youtube on my TV and the quality is great.
By the way, he showed me the signal indicator on the router description, it is maximum strength so the wall isn't causing a problem.

[Big Kev]

There was a call out fee but once I'd applied the pensioner's discount all was good

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

I don't know what Talktalk did to my email service yesterday but all the little glitches have vanished.... I do like a result!

[Stanley]

See THIS

Does this 'Keranger' ransom malware have any significance for Ubuntu users?

[Pluggy]

You can sleep easy Stanley. It holds no threat to Ubuntu (or any Linux) users. Its made the news because its the first encrypting ransomware that isn't for Windows.