[Chester LUG] Ethernet over power

[Roger Gibson]

Hi Les, Glad you are improving.

Re signalling over the mains, I do it.  Bear in mind my internet at the 
end of a few miles of damp string telephone line rarely gets up to 
1Mbps, so I don't ask a lot.  However, with a long straggly house with 
thick stone walls, a wireless router was not really man enough for the 
job, so to connect Maire's office to mine at opposite ends of the house 
I bought a

Belkin Powerline AV Networking Adapter (200 Mbps) 

for about £55 a year ago.  It has two 13A plug units which I plugged in 
and it worked without any setting up.  I have a wireless router at each 
end which each looks after things locally, wireless to laptops, hard 
wired to PC and printserver etc.  Electrically, the rooms are on very 
different circuits.  It advised not connecting through my Belkin 
Surgemaster, but I forget now whether I tried this or not.  We get 
fairly frequent power cuts, but it seems to cope.

I shall be away for a week over the New Year if you want to borrow it to 
try.

On a different tack, I had problems recently with a dual boot laptop 
having it's Windows 7 system, which had been given to a charity I work 
with for nothing by MS, and I had been running successfully and legally 
for a couple of months or more, which suddenly started saying the system 
was invalid, possibly pirated, and that I should reactivate it.  I 
followed the instructions to do this, but it would not reactivate, and 
told me to ring someone at MS on a UK 0800 number.  This I did, and the 
person who answered quickly said it was too technical for him, and when 
could he get a colleague to call.  I stated a time, and on the dot a 
very helpful chappie from MS in New Delhi rang, understood the problem 
straight away, and asked me to try a few things.  He was not fazed by my 
using Firefox, 'it has a lot of good features we must try to copy' , but 
confessed himself puzzled by the error message.  He asked to take over 
my system, and I watched him looking at a host of registries without 
changing anything, all the time telling me clearly what he was doing and 
why.  He then said, this is very puzzling, he would have to think about 
it and consult his colleagues.  Then he said, 'it has fixed itself', and 
sure enough the error message had gone.  He did a few more tests, 
confessed to still being very puzzled, 'but then funny things do happen, 
but not so often as with Vista.  That was a terrible system'.  He then 
promised to ring me in a week, at a time of my choosing, to check it was 
still OK.  He was so informative and polite.  Never once was it 
suggested I had done anything wrong.  Dual booting was a perfectly 
reasonable thing to do.  I've got his personal email address, so if ever 
I want help again, I'll try him.  I was so surprised to get polite 
helpful common sense from MS, I thought I would share this.

Last Thursday in December is New Year's Eve, second last is Christmas 
Eve, any plans for a December meeting!
                     Roger.

Les Pritchard wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I hope you had a good time at the social. I'm now slowy on the mend so will
> see you all soon.
>
> I have a question about these ethernet over power systems that are around. I
> know they've been mentioned before at the LUG, has anyone got any experience
> of using them?  I'm hopefully moving house in the near future and really
> can't face cabling CAT5 to all the rooms again. I know that's not the techie
> way, but for now I don't want to go round chipping out perfectly good walls
> as I spent enough time doing that in the current house!  So I figured that
> these solutions could be a way of getting net access / video streaming to
> the rooms. I could go with a wireless bridge, but I'm assuming that the
> 200meg powerline systems should give me a better throughput, even if it
> isn't really 200meg.
>
> Am I right in thinking they work across the house's phase and not just a
> circuit within it?
>
> Your experiences good or bad will be appreciated!
>
> Thanks
>
> Les
>
>
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