We apologize for the inconvenience
It's been a very tough month here.
Because of an offer I couldn't refuse, I wound up working far from home and living in a facility which claims to offer "free high-speed Internet". The problem is, they don't. Or rather, someone put in some equipment and told them they did, but it is neither properly wired nor correctly configured. The owners and local manager are computer-illiterate, and the company which did the work thinks that
- 2 pairs of a 3-pair telephone cable are good enough for Ethernet (why'd they bother to invent CAT5, anyway?), and
- they can just run it at 100 Mbps.
What happened is that the stuff 50 feet from their router worked OK, but at 150 feet from their router I was getting 100% packet loss on 1500-byte pings to 192.168.1.1. A lot of my data was never getting so far as the cable modem. I literally had to click for half an hour to get to the next message in my Yahoo mail on several occasions.
I tried to let everyone know, but I literally could not post (the Captcha image never loaded in less than half an hour). One of the things that kinda made it was one of my attempts to update the template here. Unfortunately, it only uploaded a partial template. That scotched the main page.
Now that I'm back on-line, I see I have some patching up to do. I'm going to try to recover the original template, or at least fix things up so it looks sort of like it did. In the mean time, this should put the blog back on line.
Off to find some template-compatible glue at the hardware store...
¶ 6/17/2006 04:50:00 PM
What steams me is that they could probably have eliminated most of the problems (and saved me weeks of misery) by the simple expedient of setting their router down to 10 Mbps. I doubt that the modem on the other side of it goes even that fast, so the only effect of the higher speed is to make the whole thing fail. Kind of like trying to drive an Indy car at 150 MPH on a logging road.
Out of idle curiosity, did you try locking your Ethernet hardware down to 10 Mbps? I don't think I've ever seen a switch that was capable of 100 Mbps that wouldn't come down to 10 Mbps on a port if the PC refused to negotiate the higher rate. Of course, if they had an old hub in there (can you even buy a hub these days?), everyone has to run at the speed the hub has selected.
No, I'm definitely not a network or Linux expert, I just use the stuff.
Then you have to fiddle with either modutils, udev or /etc/modules - I don't know red hat based distributions at all
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