Work following a chap home shocker.

[hirez]

At about quarter-to-mumble this AM, the internet connection expired, which caused the usual amount of grousing.

It still strikes me as really quite something that I have a permanent (mostly...) IP connection into my house and it has never involved any of the traditional pissing about with BT screwing a half-dozen different boxes to the side of the cupboard under the stairs and demanding a sequence of forms, the least impenetrable of which being the RIPE-141.

I think I was one of the first set of people in the UK to have an ADSL line installed. One of the chaps at, er, Orchestream came steaming over and made it plain that I should sign up to this (free!) BT experimental service, even though it did require me to lie through my teeth about having Windows kit directly connected to a dialup.

When the engineers came, it soon transpired that most people turned out to be lying through their teeth about the state of their computers. They rolled their eyes a bit, surveyed the mess that was the telecoms provision at 465 Archway Road and left me with three boxes of varying sizes and a Permanent! Internet! Connection!

Then-work had a fantastically expensive 128k leased-line shared between a floor of coders and a floor of coke-hoovering hoorays not-coders.

I had, um, probably about the same sort of bandwidth, but all to myself. Truly I was living in the future. It was 1998.

* * *

I poked at the kit for a bit, realised that it was probably a decade since I bought any new network hardware, and it was likely high time I did something about the length of scruffy wire that I threw down the stairwell as a temporary measure in, er 2001.

So we went to out-of-town queueing and shouting facility at Longwell Green and bought an incinerator.

Then I backtracked, put a bag over my head so no-one would recognise me, and stole quietly into PeeCeeWorld for some powerline networking kit and the cheapest wireless router I could find. All a bit declassé, really. Working, though.

I think I shall be quite sad if my ancient (V2.0) WRT54G really has blown up, since I never did get around to having it OpenWRT with the thing. I'll give it a prod tomorrow once its had a rest and see if it responds.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

If it's dead, can I please blag its modem cable? (or else, have my cable-deficient 54G)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

This one's just router/fw/wireless - DSL gubbins not included.