We were singin’….
Yesterday evening we had a big thunderstorm with thunder and lightning (very very frightening). There was a huge crash over the house and some lightning nearby. Bec’s headphones crackled. Last night when I was on the phone I noticed the phone was making weird high pitched beeps while I was talking and listening. The internet had disconnected as well. The modem logged on for about 10 seconds then disconnected, then logged on then disconnected. Eventually it could not log on any more.
I performed some testing this morning and discovered that if I unplugged the ADSL modem the beeps went away. Plugging it in again brought them back. It appears our modem has fried. I can access it’s config page etc but it cannot get a line sync to the phone line. This means it cannot connect to the internet.
I fished out our really old Alcatel SpeedTouch Home modem and after ringing IINET have managed to configure things so one computer at home can access the internet at a time when it’s plugged into the modem. A long time ago I had a FreeBSD server configured to connect to the modem and IINET and share out the network connection to other computers, but the current server isn’t set up that way. It doesn’t even have two network cards which are required to do this. It looks like we have to purchase a new ADSL modem which is a shame as I wanted to get away from ADSL in the future so we would not have to pay for line rental on a phone line we dont use. We have our mobile phones and a lot of ISPs offer VOIP these days so you can talk to people via the internet like a normal phone line.
I used my mobile phone to surf the web and find out the IP Address of the old ADSL modem but have never configured a connection without the crappy Telstra Bigpond software. IINET talked me through setting up the connection using the Windows XP internet connection wizard. It still didn’t work so we looked around the settings on the modem and didn’t find anything to change so he suggested I try the connection again and it just worked. I guess it just need some time to work.
I will update info on the blog later about our Christmas day.
