- entry 2009/08/06

Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Two engineers arrived. Subcontractors. They took it well, what with our telephony that is probably from the '60s. They hooked a beeper onto the line and then went off to fiddle with the wires someplace else.

Moments later, the post arrived and in it a parcel from Orange. The Livebox. I can't believe they actually posted it! It took mere moments to get this thing out of its pack.
Changes from the previous ones I've seen?

• The ethernet sockets are at the bottom, thus meaning it is impossible to plug in a wired network and have the thing stand up! Also, it seems the sockets are fixed to one for computers and one for a TV decoder. I wonder how many people know you can hook it to the WAN port of a router for multiple computers?
• It used to offer a USB slave so it would appear like a USB broadband modem. Now it is a USB host, evidently for the connection of harddiscs and such. What the hell? Are they planning on putting apache in this thing?
• No sexy pulsating '&' logo. While that was the old France Telecom logo, I rather imagine the fluorescent mini-lamp and variable intensity controller could have affected WiFi and such.

I hooked it up, plugged it in (except to the phone line, obviously) and totally ignored the installation CD. If you have a web browser and email software, you don't need the CD. You can authenticate it quite easily by getting Windows to try to connect to the WiFi access point. While it is doing so, press the button on the LiveBox. You may need to do it twice. It will work.
You can then connect to http://168.192.1.1 and it will show you the LiveBox stats/setup. If you get that far, that's all you need to know.

The engineers came back half an hour later and plugged in the Livebox. They seemed slightly surprised that I got it going without the installation CD. I covered myself by saying that the computer has no optical drive. In reality, I don't see the purpose of cluttering a small solid state disc (SSD) with bloated software that isn't actually necessary.

They said it may take a few days for it to all come on-line. The next thing I noticed was Avast popping up a message to say it had updated.

I ran an immediate speed test, you can read the results here:

Well... That's it. After a seven and a half year absence, I am back on-line!

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Rick, 3rd November 2016, 21:37

Internet was originally 1mbit. That changed after a short while to be 2mbit, which is about the most reliable I'm going to get at the end of nearly 5km of ancient cable.  Here's a speed test performed today (3rd November 2016): http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html?id=14782052 15504720655

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