Can you do that with blutack?

You may recall that from time to time, we here in the Athenaeum Club have had problems with our internet connection. It was the erratic nature of the service (quite apart from the cost and the measly 512k speed) that decided me in July 2005 that we should ditch Entanet and move on to Plus Net. It hasn't been plain sailing with them, either, but by and large the speed has been much better (currently just above 4mB and limited only by the unmodified exchange) and we have had fewer instances of the connection dropping.

So far, so good.

Anyways up. ellefurtle does so like her World of Warcraft - indeed she is being murdered by a couple of giants as I type - but the connection she has been getting over the past week has made play increasingly impossible. At one point she was achieving a latency of over 7,000ms rather than the usual 35 to 50ms. In other words it was completely unplayable with even typed comments taking up to two minutes to appear, much less the result of any actions. Myself, I don't use teh intarweb for anything like that. I torrent, stream the odd video and bits of radio, but generally content myself with mundane surfing and stuff. Nonetheless, I was beginning to find download rates falling away and it was getting rather annoying.

Today I decided to investigate.

The router set up we have here in the Athenaeum is one that was hashed together back in the mists of time, by anyone of a number of ex-tenants. I probably know the person who jerry-rigged it, but I don't know which one of them it was. All but one reads this journal on occasion, so it's probably just as well.

The telephone and main ADSL point are down in the lounge. The router is on the floor above and the computers are spread around between the second floor and up here in The Tower. There is a cable leading out from the living room ADSL point out through the window and up a storey to re-enter through the window of colonel_maxim's computer room. That is where the router is kept. From there we have three cables, one to the Colonel's PC in the same room and two that snake up the stairs to the computer room in The Tower; one for my PC, another for ellefurtle's Mac.

Having checked all the connections up here, including the subsidiary router I have acting primarily as an extension so that we don't have to have Elle and my computers clustered around the door, we turned our attention to the router. I don't think its performance had been helped by the fact it was covered in discarded clothing which had insulated it magnificently. I don't know what its optimal operating temperature is, but I'm pretty sure the casing should be cooler than my cup of coffee. To give it time to recover I pulled the plug on it and then moved it out from its nest. Sadly, once cooler it performed no better and then lost the internet connection entirely. My suspicions turned to the jerry-rigged BT ADSL box under the Colonel's table. Since it was not fixed to anything, simply acting as a connector between two sets of cables, I surmised that something might have come loose inside. So unscrewed it to have a look.

I was correct: something had come loose inside. I think it was reality. I was confronted not by anything resembling standard wiring and frankly I have no idea how it worked as well as it did for as long as it did.

An ADSL cable has four wires in it, of which only two are really necessary and they get spliced into two pairs before being attached to their respective terminals in the connector. Our cable had no sleeve to hold the wires in place and no screws to hold the sleeve down. Instead there were four randomly disposed wires protruding from the cable, only one of which was still sitting in a terminal. The rest were sunk into a blob of blutack, which had been jammed in there to perform the work of the restraining sleeve and the assembly screws. The miracle is that we have somehow been running up to three computers off this set up for two years.

Well, it's fixed now. Elle and I have run an extension cable up the stairs, used a male-to-male ADSL adaptor to plug the router into the extension and all seems to be well. The World of Warcraft latency is back down to around 40 and my download speeds have recovered. More to the point, the router is hidden away from meandering laundry and connected to the outside world by a series of connections that look as though, and are designed to do the job properly.

I understand now why the BT engineer scratched his head when he came around to look at the set up 18 months or so ago. He said it shouldn't work, though it obviously did. He hadn't seen the magic blutack though. That was where the real mojo lay.

Can you do that with blutack?

You may recall that from time to time, we here in the Athenaeum Club have had problems with our internet connection. It was the erratic nature of the service (quite apart from the cost and the measly 512k speed) that decided me in July 2005 that we should ditch Entanet and move on to Plus Net. It hasn't been plain sailing with them, either, but by and large the speed has been much better (currently just above 4mB and limited only by the unmodified exchange) and we have had fewer instances of the connection dropping.

So far, so good.

Anyways up. ellefurtle does so like her World of Warcraft - indeed she is being murdered by a couple of giants as I type - but the connection she has been getting over the past week has made play increasingly impossible. At one point she was achieving a latency of over 7,000ms rather than the usual 35 to 50ms. In other words it was completely unplayable with even typed comments taking up to two minutes to appear, much less the result of any actions. Myself, I don't use teh intarweb for anything like that. I torrent, stream the odd video and bits of radio, but generally content myself with mundane surfing and stuff. Nonetheless, I was beginning to find download rates falling away and it was getting rather annoying.

Today I decided to investigate.

The router set up we have here in the Athenaeum is one that was hashed together back in the mists of time, by anyone of a number of ex-tenants. I probably know the person who jerry-rigged it, but I don't know which one of them it was. All but one reads this journal on occasion, so it's probably just as well.

The telephone and main ADSL point are down in the lounge. The router is on the floor above and the computers are spread around between the second floor and up here in The Tower. There is a cable leading out from the living room ADSL point out through the window and up a storey to re-enter through the window of colonel_maxim's computer room. That is where the router is kept. From there we have three cables, one to the Colonel's PC in the same room and two that snake up the stairs to the computer room in The Tower; one for my PC, another for ellefurtle's Mac.

Having checked all the connections up here, including the subsidiary router I have acting primarily as an extension so that we don't have to have Elle and my computers clustered around the door, we turned our attention to the router. I don't think its performance had been helped by the fact it was covered in discarded clothing which had insulated it magnificently. I don't know what its optimal operating temperature is, but I'm pretty sure the casing should be cooler than my cup of coffee. To give it time to recover I pulled the plug on it and then moved it out from its nest. Sadly, once cooler it performed no better and then lost the internet connection entirely. My suspicions turned to the jerry-rigged BT ADSL box under the Colonel's table. Since it was not fixed to anything, simply acting as a connector between two sets of cables, I surmised that something might have come loose inside. So unscrewed it to have a look.

I was correct: something had come loose inside. I think it was reality. I was confronted not by anything resembling standard wiring and frankly I have no idea how it worked as well as it did for as long as it did.

An ADSL cable has four wires in it, of which only two are really necessary and they get spliced into two pairs before being attached to their respective terminals in the connector. Our cable had no sleeve to hold the wires in place and no screws to hold the sleeve down. Instead there were four randomly disposed wires protruding from the cable, only one of which was still sitting in a terminal. The rest were sunk into a blob of blutack, which had been jammed in there to perform the work of the restraining sleeve and the assembly screws. The miracle is that we have somehow been running up to three computers off this set up for two years.

Well, it's fixed now. Elle and I have run an extension cable up the stairs, used a male-to-male ADSL adaptor to plug the router into the extension and all seems to be well. The World of Warcraft latency is back down to around 40 and my download speeds have recovered. More to the point, the router is hidden away from meandering laundry and connected to the outside world by a series of connections that look as though, and are designed to do the job properly.

I understand now why the BT engineer scratched his head when he came around to look at the set up 18 months or so ago. He said it shouldn't work, though it obviously did. He hadn't seen the magic blutack though. That was where the real mojo lay.