Over the last few weeks, I’ve had continuing long periods of ADSL outage where I get no ADSL connection at all and the modem reports a ‘physical line error’. I’ve had a hard time convincing my ISP, Plusnet that it is nothing to do with my equipment or wiring as I’ve changed modems, cables, ADSL splitters and even changed my master socket (yes I know you’re not supposed to but BT haven’t called to check it so I thought I’d change it so at least I can be fully confident about my equipment). The connection simply disappears for over 24 hours, the longest period being nearly 4 days!
One of the problems I’ve had is that when I report the fault, it can take 24 hours for BT to run their tests and by then the connection has come back up and they say there’s no problem, it must be at my end. Finally during the 4 day outage, they found a fault at the exchange and supposedly fixed it last Monday morning. Everything worked fine until Monday afternoon this week when the connection dropped again. I reported it to Plusnet who have managed to test the line again while I have no connection and tell me that although ’some work has been carried out at the exchange’, the fault is still there. The connection was back on when I woke this morning.
Call me a cynic but I swear someone at BT is using the Sky Digital method of tech support: switch it off and if it works when you switch it back on, the fault must be fixed. Someone is arriving at the exchange with a fault report, rebooting some equipment and leaving again. Then the clearly faulty equipment is failing again a few days later.
If it isn’t fixed permanently this time, it looks like I’ll have to try and get it escalated as I’ve been without ADSL for over 8 days this month.
Update 06/08/2008: Having arranged for a visit from BT to investigate the fault last Friday morning between 8:00am and 1:00pm they decided not to show so I wasted most of the day at home for nothing. Apparently there “was a problem with the engineer and they couldn’t get to me today”. Got a call from Plusnet late afternoon on Friday to say that BT had received other complaints from the area and discovered that I was connected to a faulty line card at the exchange. One had been ordered and would be fitted ASAP. My internet came back on again on Sunday Morning and has stayed on so far. What a pathetic saga lasting over 5 weeks just to prove that BT had a faulty line card. I was offline for days at a time and they couldn’t diagnose a faulty line card as the cause?
I’ve made a couple of changes to the commenting facilities on the blog. You no longer need to be a registered user to post a comment. However, to help combat the inevitable increase in spam from that move, I’ve instigated a captcha routine on the comments form. Every comment will now require you to enter the code you see in the image presented to you. Comments are also still moderated.
These changes should make it easier if readers just want to post a quick comment in response to an item.
Are your Office 2007 applications slowing right down when you try to open or insert a file and you’re getting the progress window shown below as soon as you try and navigate in the file open dialog box?
The cause of the problem is a mapped drive not connected correctly. If you open Windows Explorer and check through your mapped network drives, you will probably find one that cannot connect to it’s specified source. If you disconnect it, your Office 2007 applications should start behaving again.
If you use AVG anti-virus from Grisoft, you may be aware of some rather heated debate in the IT community regarding it’s new LinkScanner feature included with version 8.0 of the software. The Register has discussed it several times for example.
Basically, what AVG LinkScanner does is to forward scan every result returned by your internet searches to check if the websites are malware of virus loaded. In theory, I’m sure that this was a great idea, but in practice it has its problems. Firstly, it’s using more bandwidth because it is fetching and scanning websites which you may have no intention of visiting and bandwidth at some point has to be paid for. Secondly, the web logs of every website returned by your search will show you as a visitor even though you’ve never been there. This makes a mockery of any form of traffic analysis based on those logs. This is worsened further by AVGs attempts to make the scan look as much like a normal visit as possible making it almost impossible to filter out the dummy traffic.
Most commentators have asked why AVG cannot simply scan a link when it is actually clicked on and Grisoft’s response is that they do that as well. I fail to see how scanning a link twice is more likely to find a virus or malware than scanning it once. It’s just unnecessary overhead.
I have disabled LinkScanner in AVG 8.0 and would urge other users to do the same until Grisoft get themselves sorted out.
(The AVG control centre icon now shows a permanent exclamation mark since part of it is disabled and unlike Windows XP’s Security Centre, there seems to be now way to tell AVG that I want it to ignore that module completely.)
Update: I found the setting to get rid of the annoying exclamation mark on the system tray icon. Open the AVG Control Panel, Click Tools >> Advanced Settings >> Ignore Faulty Conditions and click LinkScanner. I’m sure this wasn’t there when I first went looking but when I just went looking again, there it was! Maybe someone can confirm if this option was added as a result of an update?
I wanted to widen the screen area of the blog since anyone with any interest in IT is going to be running in at least 1024×768 and since I’m running a K2-based theme it was just case of tweaking the CSS of my style to change the width. Note that you make these changes in the CSS file for your style and not the core K2 css file. Any changes made to your style overide the defaults in the core file.
Anyway, after finding several sources simply telling me to either change the #page entry or to add a Layout Widths entry, the truth turned out to be completely different. Neither of these had any effect whatsoever and after studying the core CSS file I found I needed to add an entry:
columns-two #page { width: 950px; }
and then add
width: 650px;
to the #primary entry.
At about 11:00am on Tuesday, my ADSL connection disappeared. I was at work so I couldn’t investigate until early evening when I discovered that the modem was reporting a “physical line error”. Having done the usual checks such as connecting the modem to the master telephone socket with nothing else connected and swapping out the ADSL micro-filter, I had to assume a line fault, although the phones were still working.
My broadband provide is Plusnet and I’ve always had a really reliable service from them so have never had to call them before. They ran their tests which failed and escalated the problem to BT and I waited for an update. The next morning at about the same time 11:00am, my ADSL came back on. Within 30 minutes there was an update on my support ticket from BT telling me that no fault could be found!
My guess? A dozy BT engineer disconnected ADSL on the wrong line on Tuesday and it was corrected the next day with no questions asked. Rather than take the blame, they just shifted it back to the customer who would normally just assume that it had been a problem at their end all along. Unfortunately for BT, some of us know better!
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