Still As Life

In continuing on from my blog the other day where I was wondering what would happen if I were to run a second router on our phone line.

Well, I picked up a Netcomm NB5 yesterday for $45 at Umart Online, brought it home and hooked it up.

After a fair amount of fiddling around, I found the following things to happen consistently:

1. For reasons I can only guess at, the NB5 will not attempt to connect when the old D-Link is connected.
2. When the D-Link is unplugged from the phone line, the NB5 will sync near instantly.
3. As soon as the D-Link is plugged back into the phone line it will boot the NB5.
4. The NB5 will not attempt to sync again until the D-Link is unplugged.

Now, I figure that only one will connect at a time due to the static IP provided by TPG, what I don’t understand though is why the old router will consistently kick the new one off every time it is plugged in but the new one will not affect the old one at all. The only thing I can think of is that the old ADSL router firmware is much more aggressive than the firmware on the new adsl2+ router. So I’m guessing the NB5 checks the line, determines there is a connection, and leaves it be until the connection is gone, whereas the old router doesn’t.

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It’s weekends like this weekend, even more so, days like today, that the $39 a month for my 3G modem is well worth it.

Yes there have been plenty of other times it has proved invaluable, such as keeping my internet usage at uni below 150mb. After all, to get another 5gb at uni it would cost me $35 anyway.

However, last night while I was out, either our router had gotten fed up with life and hit the reset button, or someone helped it out. Thus our ADSL2+ settings were wiped, along with all of my port forwarding, remote access and so on. Yay.

That in and of itself is not a hugely significant problem, it’s just annoying and frustrating. The main problem is that I don’t have the internet connection details that are particularly important, such as the username and password. Okay, that’s alright, I can deal with that.

Can’t get through to my landlord on the phone around lunch time today, so I send him a message asking for the details, or asking if he can come around and put them in himself.

He calls me back a couple hours later and tells me he doesn’t have the details and that the internet here is managed by the Japanese guy that lives next door (my landlord owns the house next door as well), and to go ask him or the Japanese girl that also lives there for them. So, Rhi and I go over there and ask her about them since he didn’t seem to be around. She doesn’t seem to have any idea what we are talking about and tells us that our landlord probably hasn’t paid the bill and so it has been cut off. We explain to her that that is not the case, and so she goes in yelling the guys name and asks him about it. She comes back and tells us that they aren’t looking after the internet anymore and that all the details have been given to my landlord. We then ask if we can talk to the other guy, because he was only at our place a month ago putting the username and password in our new router. She proceeds to tell us that he isn’t there. This is less than 2 minutes after we heard her calling his name and talking to him in the next room. Talk about insulting.

Anyway, she also tells us that the Chinese couple that Rhi and I share a house with know the connection details as well. So we come home and ask them about it. I thought it would be odd that they would know the details and not have already put them into the router. We ask them and they tell us they don’t know them but that they would go and talk to the guy next door. They did and he, even though is supposedly not there, tells them that he doesn’t have the details anymore and that the net was probably cut off because of the bill not being paid. I have explained to all of them that that is not the problem, the bill was not due to be paid yet, and if they would actually listen to me, they would realise that they routers username is set to user@isp.com.au and the password is set to who knows what, but there are 12 stars. Why? Because it has been reset to the factory default settings.

So, try to call my landlord again and no luck so I send him another message. I have not yet heard back from him, but I tell you I am unimpressed.

We have gotten it back finally, but man am I not happy about the organisation of things here, or about being so blatantly lied to.

Not happy Jan.

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