The Ergosphere
Saturday, June 17, 2006
 

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

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...

 
Comments:
Sounds like a Red & Green job. Was there duct tape involved?
 
No, no duct tape.  I think they may even have used a proper punchdown tool at the wall plate.

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.
 
And yes, women do find me handy.
 
I sympathize greatly with your problem. For a while, my last real job involved occasionally setting up data service demos that sometimes had to run at least partially over hotels' idea of Ethernet.

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.
 
I tried to find a way to lock my interface down to 10 Mbps, but I came up empty.  Mandriva doesn't seem to think the user should be concerned with these things, even if they have the root PW.

No, I'm definitely not a network or Linux expert, I just use the stuff.
 
If you know your ethernet device, you can option it at module load time. You can google for the options or if needed read the source code.

Then you have to fiddle with either modutils, udev or /etc/modules - I don't know red hat based distributions at all
 
Sorry, but my time was literally frittered away in clicking for half an hour at a time to get to the next damn e-mail in Yahoo.  That kind of waste leaves nothing for thought.
 
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