Thunderstorm, lightning strike, morning spent hunting modems….no, not electricity surge. Rather, phone lines got hit, modems blew up because of that.
And, amazingly, Worten and FNAC don’t sell modems. Only routers. Because the modems all come from PT so why stock something which everyone with broadband has already?
Fortunately, nice bird at the PT office replaced the blown one. Out of warranty but apparently I didn’t tell her that.
So, err, hello to you all this mornin’
I had a lightning strike a few weeks ago with similar results with the additional feature that a printer on the network was also fried.
Irritating.
Hullo Tim.
I hope that thunderbolt and lightning wasn’t very, very frightening you.
Our modem and router collapsed a few weeks ago. The visiting tech from our broadband supplier looked at them with horror – antediluvian, apparently. He installed a new device.
The new gadget is undoubtedly much prettier and takes up less space, though its signal doesn’t reach my study, and it stopped many of the functions on our telly working. Ain’t progress wonderful?
We’re all on 4G here, so no similar worries.
@dearime – try getting a wifi repeater. We use a pair to bridge a 70m gap from one apartment to another.
Tim,
Count your blessings, and your $s. From a sailing forum:
Suggest you buy an UPS – uninterruptible power source – with phone line protection, which sits betweens mains power socket and incoming phone line and router/modem, and has anti-surge protection as well as giving several minutes of battery back- up in the event of power failure to allow orderly close down of computer, finish print job.
There are several sockets so you can surge protect printer, PC too.
You can get them on Amazon – 70€ to 100€… also Amazon has router/modems.
dearieme,
Its a long shot but try turning the modem through 90deg. Their antenna patterns are rarely omni directional in the horizontal plane.
Thanks both. We finally bought a gizmo from Amazon that does the trick for the wifi range. The solution to the telly problem was to find someone in the family with the required youth and patience to reset it up properly.
Welcome back, Tim!
What John B said. Not having one means something will break at the most inconvenient time possible.
@ dearime
Pleased to hear of your solution. There is another wheeze for improving wi-fi range indoors – put a more-or-less parabolically shaped sheet of kitchen foil behind it, directing more of the magic rays into the house as opposed to outdoors. I used some cardboard to make a backing, and made sure the shiny side of the foil was next to modem/router. Gave us an extra ‘bar’ on the signal-strength indicator and let the desktop machine in my office connect.
Happy Agincourt Day, Tim and all!
(And a belated [21st October] Happy Trafalgar Day, too.)
It’s worth lashing out a bit more on a line-interactive UPS as compared to a basic standby UPS. You get better voltage regulation and filtering of line transients, and the transfer time in the case of an outage is shorter, meaning less glitching into the PSUs of your attached equipment. You can usually run a phone line and a coax through the UPS as well which will give you some lightning protection. At the high end, dual conversion units are even better if you have a lot of of equipment to protect (>10 kVA). And if you’re going to be switching to a generator after the lights go out, dual conversion is a must as the output of most gennies will make any other type of UPS behave very badly (it’s a power factor thing).
I’ve always found Tripp-Lite to be pretty good. Had some bad experiences with appallingly short battery lifetimes from APC units.
@BiCR
Thanks for that – very helpful and I’ve ordered something along the middle-range lines you suggest.
Con mucho gusto.
There you all go.
Totally unable to recognise that computers are ramshackle junk. Breaking down any old time. Needing constant nursing , updating and money.
Invent something else before it is too later.
Computers are not unreliable, in the main. None of my computers is less than four years old, and none of my three Linux boxes cost me a penny (they were cast-offs but still good machines: 4GB RAM, Xeon class CPU and 500GB HD). They’re rock solid. Here’s uptime from my development box at home, which I just SSH’d into from my office:
[email protected]:~$ uptime
17:01:46 up 74 days, 1:57, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.06, 0.05
If the actual power doesn’t go out for longer than my UPSs can sustain (which can happen after, you know, a tropical fucking thunderstorm), I not infrequently get uptimes of the order of a year. I’m currently logged into a production server at work that was last restarted 35 weeks ago. Even my Mac has been up for three weeks since its last reboot.
I was riding my motorbike home in a thunderstorm a few weeks ago and there was a strike close enough to induce a little tingle in the bike frame. I calmly parked up and ran the fuck away from it. Perhaps we could start a TFT support group?
Does anyone know anything about the suppressors that go in the distribution box? I’ve been considering those recently.
What kind of modem did you need? ADSL (normal broadband) or VDSL (fibre)?
Most new mid range routers come with VDSL and ADSL compatibility, and IIRC many netgears can be set to work as modems if required