Rick's b.log - entry 2010/10/11

Stupid Microsoft

Thanks to the guys on the BBC Micro mailing list, I tracked down the fault with the Linksys router that I got for €3.
The big white thing apparently is a gas-filled thingy that becomes conductive on a power surge. This, it looks, shorted the phone line and blew one of the zero-ohm resistors. It's a sacrificial system, that's supposed to happen. What wasn't supposed to happen was there is no earth point in a router powered off a power-brick, so part of the damage travelled out network socket #3 (blown capacitor as evidence) to the attached computer. With any luck it will have then blown the protection circuit on the network card and been dissipated into the case and to ground. If the guy didn't bother to screw in the expansion card backplane, well, it would need to travel to earth via the motherboard. Oops!
It all sounds a bit nasty blowing stuff, but recall this router obviously took a strike and remained operational afterwards.

Anyway, I replaced the blown resistor with a blob of solder (to suffice) and configured the box. And it works. Whoo-hoo!

But, it only sort-of works. Monday seems to be the day the epic interference takes the net down for much of the day, so there will be some times when it is just too much, even for a better router. That said, it had successfully connected numerous times when the Livebox would have just given up. And the WiFi performance is better - I'm currently sitting in a secluded sunny spot where I can't normally bother trying Internet, but here? 12mbps "very low", which is better than zero.
The Livebox is, as I said earlier, "adequate"... only adequate.

So as the Internet comes and goes, it is useful to ping a known server in order to see whether there's a connection. This is a lot nicer than trying pages in a browser which could mess up cached stuff on-screen.

And here's where you discover a cockup in the Windows version of ping:

C:\Rick>ping www.google.com

Pinging www.l.google.com [66.249.92.104] with 32 bytes of data:

Pinging 66.249.92.104 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.2.1: Destination net unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.2.1: Destination net unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.2.1: Destination net unreachable.
Reply from 192.168.2.1: Destination net unreachable.

Ping statistics for 66.249.92.104:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

C:\Rick>

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