Tag Archive: BroadBand


How NOT to wire up PSTN and ADSL

I recently stumbled across some of the worst PSTN/Broadband customer premises wiring I have ever seen. TWO lines, both with ADSL, and proper ADSL faceplates on the Master Sockets., All sounds good so far. TWO other rooms, each with extensions in for both lines, but this is where it heads south.

1. The extensions are TWO wire connected not the usual THREE
2. The extensions are connected to the telco side of the master socket, not the customer side of the master socket, so are not filtered for ADSL/PSTN use properly

The net result was, the phones do not ring, the lines is noisey (as ADSL is not filtered properly) and the modem/router only connects at 7.6Mb/s despite being only 5 meters (yes 5 Meters, that is NOT a typo) from the exchange equipment…

Yes you guessed it this is INSIDE a village telephone exchange………….

Flood, pestilence and technology

Well the UK has been hit by severe rainfalls again, resulting in massive flooding and a few unfortunate accidents

my cosy little home normally manages to escape the raging torrents of flood water. this time i get taken out by an indirect event. Between 19:25 and 20:30 last night most of Abbeymead in gloucester has no power. My UPS stayed up for 35 mins and then gave up, my friends UPS , (where my main internet connection comes in) lasted 45 minutes and then shut everything down !

so along come the power and everything starts to boot back up, when the firewall goes, kernal panic follwed by bad sector and then just to finish it off disk I/O error, and never worked again.
Out of all the things on my rather large home network to fail, it would the box with no regular backups or hot spare
Some mild panic ensued as all my SMTP emails and a few??business associates??fallback SMTP goes via this firewall !!!!!!!!!!!!

The firewall was, note the past tense, running smoothwall corp 3, with smoothhost , rule and guardian modules
corp 3 is over 3 years old, do i still have the media, do i have the licence key, do we have a spare HDD.

Fortunatly my slight over zealous, dont delete anything nature plumped up the software images, and the licence key
My friend the fitted a new hard disk, and installed the basic firewall software and connected it to our green network,

Then comes the fun part, re-config the beast, so working between trying to get the kids ready for school this morning, i managed to re-key all of the PAT and NAT forwarding rules , phew,

??NOTE to self for future reference, ??GHOST the disk , just in case