bobpeers -> blog

After a 13 day wait my internet connection is finally up. The engineer simply reconnected my plug in the switch box so it must not have been seated correctly from the start. It’s just a pity it took Dansk Bredbånd so long to send an engineer out to discover this.

We also have IP telephone now all server up through the gateway box provided by Dansk Bredbånd, it’s a Tilgin Vood 342 (pdf link) for anyone that’s interested. I noticed that without the WAN connected it acts as a DHCP server so you can connect to the admin interface in the box by going to http://192.168.2.1, I haven’t been given the username and password but searching on forums it seems that Conf/admin works. I’ll give this a try in the next few days.
It also took an extra support call to get the phone working, but fortunately that seemed to be a simple configuration error on their part as it was fixed very quickly.

As for the connection I’m actually very happy with it. I’ve tested it both in download and upload bandwidth and it easy reaches 25 Mbps in both directions so my steady stream of updates to Fedora 9 go pretty quick to say the least.

I also ordered a static IP address so I can access my server from anywhere, this is identified by the mac address of my router that I gave to Dansk Bredbånd but sometimes I just plug my laptop in without the router so though it might be useful to spoof my routers mac address. Turn out this is very easy in Linux, just do the following as root, thanks to this page.

# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:01
# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

I’ve just spoken to the engineer from Dansk Bredbånd who says that my internet connection is finally fixed after being down for 13 days now.

I’ve called Dansk Bredbånd about 8 times during this period and gone through the same tests over and over trying to prove it’s their problem and not one in my flat. I understand that they don’t want to send engineers out immediately since I suspect many problems are caused by software on the end users side but you would think after all the conversations they would realise that I’m not completely stupid and maybe it’s their fault.

After being told on at least 2 occasions than engineer would come, then calling the next day to find that no engineer was booked my frustration stared to grow. My advice is just to demand an engineer if you are sure it’s not your problem (otherwise they charge 599 DKK per hour for the visit, they also use this line as a warning which I’m sure puts off many people less technical than myself).

The engineer said that he simply unplugged and plugged back in the Ethernet cable to the switch located in the buildings basement. He also said that Dansk Bredbånd had left the door to the switch wide open so anyone with access to the basement could cause havoc, not a very smart thing to do.

I won’t be completely sure until I get home since there’s nothing connected to the router but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

After being excited about my new internet provider things got off to rather a bad start. My internet was cut off late on Wednesday June 11th and should have been connected at the latest by 7pm on Thursday the 12th. Needless to say this didn’t happen.

On Friday evening, after checking that a neighbour also had no internet, I decided to call Dansk Bredbånd to see if it was the whole building or juts a few people. After being in a queue for 40 minutes I finally got through to technical support.

It turns out that the building was connected but they somehow managed not to connect my flat. To be fair, this could be the fault of my buildings administration so I can’t blame Dansk Bredbånd directly, but being on hold for 40 minutes and now waiting 5 days without an internet connection doesn’t inspire great confidence.

On a positive note the technical help was very friendly and he seemed to know what he was talking about so there’s still hope. The final outcome is that an engineer should come today (Monday) so hopefully I’ll be able to enjoy my 25 Mbps line at last.

This also made me realise how many applications now need an active connection to function. I was helping a friend connect iTunes to his new iPod in Windows. It turns out the iPods disk was Mac formatted (HFS+) so I tried to use iTunes to reformat the drive to Windows format (FAT32). Apparently this requires an internet connection for god-knows-what reason, I see that point 1 in the linked pages says:

Ensure that you have an active Internet connection as new versions of iTunes and iPod Software may need to be downloaded to your computer.

But actually preventing the reformat for this reason seems a bit extreme especially when I know it was already the latest version.

The building I live in has decided to change the internet provider.

I should explain that I live in a block of flats where we all part own the whole building (it’s a very popular system in Denmark) and the internet and TV is provided to all flats from a central server located in the building.

I’ve been very happy with my connection, even though it’s actually shared between 218 flats, I usually get between 8-10 Mbits/s so downloading Linux iso files doesn’t take that long. A few days ago I downloaded Fedora 9 which only took around an hour or so.

However I now get to choose a package from Dansk Bredbånd (Danish link) which hopefully is as good as it looks. They use fibre that runs directly to the building which is then connected through a switch arriving through Ethernet to my flat.

The best part is that all the packages are symmetric as they have a 25 Mbits/s option (Danish link) so I get 25 Mbits/s up and down, pretty nice. On top of that the line is not shared so other users in the building do not affect my connection plus there are no download limits imposed like many providers (otherwise known as ‘traffic shaping’ in sales talk).

I’m debating about also getting a static IP address since then I can connect to my NAS device from anywhere or even login over SSH.

It gets switched over on June the 10th so I’ll post on my opinions of the service.