Robert Leverington

Ever since moving my computer I’ve been having trouble with the wi-fi connection, adding a USB extension lead didn’t clear this up and I suspect that the wireless stick is simply nearing the end of its life. I had two other wireless adapters to try out (one from Linksys and one from Belkin) that I could never get working before, after much experimentation the software for neither worked - from what I could tell it was half finished and untested. In the end I removed them both and plugged the LAN cable back in, routed through the windows.

Today Homplug arrived, it seemed worth a try given the amount of failure wireless had given me so far. I am, quite frankly, amazed. All I needed to do was plug both the adapters in and it just worked; no messing with software or drivers, just plug and play. I’m very happy now, and the quality of the connection is also brilliant (100mbps). This will allow me to try out Ubuntu since there will be no need to mess about with setting up a wireless connection, just need to make myself a live CD that actually works.

Last weekend I rearranged my room, and sadly in the process I managed to put my desk in to a place which had ultra poor wireless signal quality so my internet was breaking up all last week. Last night this finally got to me so I threw together a small cable holding rig (see below, need to find some elastic bands to hold it together instead of the parcel tape and twist cables) and chucked my 30 meter network cable out the window. I’ll be having to do this every day until I can afford home plug (ethernet over mains) or persuade someone to drill a hole in to the extensions loft space and run the cable around there (since I’m not permitted to run a cable through the house itself).

I also managed to make a major error in positioning my wardrobe and will need to reconsider its position.

I’ve been trying to tie my three home systems together in a network for about a year and a half now, utterly failing each time due to how Windows works (only allowing you to connect to one internet source at a time, and defaulting to the LAN one). Today I decided that I’m going to give up trying and instead look in to getting a Linksys NSLU2, which would serve almost all the purposes my network was meant to - and be just as much of a learning experience. This also means I’ve taken the cheap KVM out of the loop between my monitor and computer, and it looks oh so much better now. As part of my wider general tidy up (involving lots of stuff going on eBay) much of the hardware that I’ve purchased for this will be being sold, hopefully it will actually sell.

I’ve wanted to get a new phone for over a year now, my old one being considerably old and bulky. I was eager to get an iPhone, but sadly the contract is very expensive and the pay as you go version will not be released until Christmas (and it would most likely be infeasible to make full use of the device given the cost of mobile internet browsing). Recently, however, my step-father noticed an offer for 100 texts and 100 minutes a month plus a phone with Virgin Mobile. Since we already had cable television, broadband, and a land line phone through Virgin Media this was only £10.00 a month - a bargain price. It was easily possible for me to spend that much a month on credit with Orange, and not get half as much as what is on offer here.

Switching my number from Orange to Virgin was less satisfying though, I must have spent an hour on the phone in total. Firstly Orange’s systems were quite often down so I’d get through and be told to call back later, and when they did promise to send me my PAC code through the post within three days this never materialized. Fortunately they simply texted it to me when I phoned them to query about this. Next I had to battle with Virgin Mobile and when I finally got through the man told me that since I wasn’t the account holder I couldn’t authorize the transfer - but I knew the secret word!

The phone itself is brilliant, it does everything I wanted and more; the camera is much better than my old digital camera in terms of quality at 3.2 mega pixels (although response time can be slightly irritating, and the flash is useless). It has touch buttons on the front, and while this does make it nicer to use in some circumstances they are prone to being pressed accidentally. The fact that it actually connects to the computer with minimal fuss is also great.

I am now awaiting a Micro SD card so I can upgrade it’s memory, once installed it may actually be feasible for it to replace my iPod nano as well as my digital camera which would be fantastic. Overall I am extremely pleased with the phone and package, it’s just sad that getting my number transferred was so frustrating.

For over a year now I’ve been trying to set up a network in my room, yet have succeeded at failing every time. Currently I have four systems semi-permanently based in my room; a desktop running Windows XP, a laptop running Windows XP, and two tower servers both running Ubuntu 8.04. It is impractical to purchase wireless cards or dongles for each of these, especially given the unreliability that they inherently have, so I bought myself a router and planned to tie them all together in one network; using one of the two servers as a proxy so the other three systems may access the internet.

Step one in this solution was finding a wireless card that was supported by the Linux Kernel. Firstly I tried a wireless to ethernet bridge, unfourtunatley this did not work (I haven’t worked out why, but it may perhaps be because it was designed for IP phones rather than conventional equipment); so I got myself a Belkin F5D7000 Wireless PCI Card and fitted into the designated proxy server and booted it up. A fresh copy of Ubuntu 8.04 was already installed on it so I thought it would just be a case of following the instructions in iwconfig, although it politely informed me that no wireless interfaces were available. After a few minues searching on the Linux Wireless website I discovered that extra files were needed to go in my firmware install directory; I broke out a 30m Cat5e cable I had and plugged it in to the downstairs router so I could download the files, unfourtunatley it wouldn’t detect the wired network by default either and so this is where I am now stuck. I recall Ubuntu 7.04 working fine out of the box with a wired DHCP network, although apparently this is not the case with Hardy Heron (which has lots of stuff that used to be working out of the box disabled, for some reason). Today I didn’t have the patience to research into my problem, perhaps one day I might get things working though.

Another thing making it difficult to do is that I can’t be connected to my wireless and wired network from my desktop simultaneously - that means that I have to constantly switch over the monitor cable if I am to have any internet connection. Apparently this has something to do with Windows XP only allowing one network interface at a time, once I start using the proxy his should no longer be an issue though.

Below is a diagram showing the proposed layout of my network.

Update 1: For anyone who is interested the device is “Belkin Unkown device 700f (rev 20)” and printout from lspci -n was “0200: 1799:700f”.