Chasing the CIA
I am breaking a little personal rule here.
I try not to post consecutive scribbles on the same topic but what the hell. It’s my site and I can break the rules if I want to.
Yesterday I toddled up to Dublin to get a couple more Powerline plugs. These are little devices that transmogrify wireless signals onto the house’s power circuit. It means that I don’t have to run cables all over the place which is a bit of all right.
So I unpacked the two plugs and matched them to the existing plugs [to stop the neighbours snooping]. All fine and dandy.
Armed with one of the plugs I marched up to the attic where the front wifi once broadcast from. I fired up my mobile phone which has a little wifi sniffer on it. There in all its glory was CIA-Front signal! [before you ask – Curratech Interweb Access!] What the fuck? I had brought up the old router so where was the signal coming from? I brought up my laptop and connected to the signal. It connected all right but that was it. No Interweb or anything.
So somehow I was connecting to a wifi that didn’t exist. I know that because the router was lying on the floor unplugged. Do walls have memory? Was this some previously unknown property of granite boulders? Was the signal just bouncing around the room in a perpetual motion for the last few months?
Sadly I found the solution to the mystery.
There was another router I had forgotten about [newer that the unplugged one]. It was buried under a pile of books and was quite hot. I connected it to the Powerline and all was well. CIA-Front was back in action.
So I pootled back downstairs, connected to my CCTV and told the camera to connect to the front network which is a lot nearer than CIA-Back. Fuck me but it woudn’t connect. Why? I don’t know.
In desperation I connected the camera by cable to the fourth Powerline plug. That didn’t work either. If the fucking thing can only use wifi why the fuck did they include a network socket? It wouldn’t switch off the wifi.
Suddenly the camera decided to connect to the Front signal. Again, I don’t know why. It’s still disconnecting regularly.
I think I am going to have to move the camera nearer to the router.
But that means removing the connectors from their nice safe dry spot under the eaves.
Fuck!.
With all those WiFi signals running around it's amazing that anything connects to anything. So, are all these routers and powerline plugs pushing 2.4 Ghz, 5.0 Ghz or perhaps both? Or is it some funky off frequency? And how many channels each?
I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.
The system claims that it can handle up to 1.3 Gigabit so you can work out the frequency for yourself. The back router works on Channel 3 and 106 while the front works on Channel 11 and 38. Mind you, the only device tat uses the 5.0 band is the smart phone. One of the few drawbacks of Linux!
P.S. Now running Cinnamon 19.2!
I ran the 19.2 alpha builds PPA on my old Thinkpad T430 and then did a clean install of the the beta (Cinnamon). I'm leaving my main machine as is until the upgrade is released The only glitch I've found so far is that I can no longer increase the font size in the Mint Update manager's "Details" terminal when installing updates. In 19.1 and before I just had to bring up the Synaptic package manager and increase the terminal font size in Preferences and voila'–bigger font size in Mintupdate's "Details". Unfortunately, no longer.
Glad to hear that yer interwebs are now working 🙂
Off Topic (but I do recall you – rightly – moaning about this in the past): “Wor’er” as we sayz in Cambridge.
Irish Times says that metered customers are using too much so should be fined…
I thought that “metered” meant that you were charged for what you used (that’s how it works in Blighty) so the “fine” is that you pay for what you use. Is this Irish logic that it works so you pay more than what you pay for???
And doesn’t Ireland have quite a lot of water anyway? More than you’d think needs rationing? Is the crisis caused by Wobal Glorming???
See the next post! 😈
If you live in the R Send of nowhere maybe. But anyone unfortunate enough to live nearby to someone using them can forget trying to listen to the AM radio bands, or use HF amateur radio. F***ing things should have been strangled at birth – who thought it was a good idea to push data signals over unscreened mains cable?
Does anyone listen to AM these days? And as for ham radio, tough shit. I now all about that subject!
Having an external cavity wall inside the house because of an extension created a no-go wifi zone for me but the powerline connecters solution I tried was worse than useless. I never managed to get more than 2 to reliably connect and stay connected, and even then only when close together. Eventually bit the bullet and ran cat 5 around – reliable and twice as fast as the wifi connection was. Not too bad a job if you use carefully placed switches so that only one cat5 is required for an area – eg only one cable from router to upstairs which then splits out via a switch to my office, the wife's pc and a wifi sender.
This house is a nightmare for wifi. The front half of the house has two foot thick granite walls so has to have its own network. The back of the house isn't too bad [all cavity concrete walls] so that's where the main network is [and also the point where the main wired connection comes in]. The CCTV is in a tricky spot – a long way from the back router and close to the front one, but the latter has to get through the granite! The only master solution is to install yet another wifi network just for the garage.
I've been using PowerLine for years…
But I've just dumped all of it in favour of Google Mesh WiFi.
It really is a sensational product – I wish I'd got rid of the PowerLine stuff years ago.
And the house here is reinforced concrete (because of earthquakes) but it still works perfectly.
Never heard of it before! I just had a browse and it looks interesting [apart from a personal distrust of Google!]. Having just shelled out on more Powerline plugs I'll shelve the idea of a change for a while. Wait 'til the Missus cools down a bit…..
I hadn't 'til very recently…
I was actually on Amazon's website looking to buy some extra Powerline devices when I noticed some Mesh WiFi devices…
A quick Google and I stumbled across the um, Google product which gets great reviews. I bought three units and installed over an hour or so. By the end I found I had a pile of Powerline devices (heading for ebay) and cables which I no longer needed.
Performance is amazing and as all the devices have the same SSID I can wander around the house on WhatsApp without disconnecting.
The only 'gotchya' I discovered (which wasn't mentioned in any of the reviews) was that the 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals share the same SSID that you set the system up with…
…and the problem that creates is that your mobile defaults to 5GHz and you cannot therefore access any of your 2.4GHz devices to configure them. Short of walking to the end of the garden so the 5GHz drops out, the only solution I found was to dig out an ancient phone that only has 2.4GHz.
As you need to run power to the camera.
Why not use a powerline ethernet adapter.
Then connect the camera ethernet lead into that.
You need to reset the camera back to factory defaults(Hold that button down for about 10 seconds), to reconfigure the camera to use wired ethernet.
I tried connecting to the camera via ethernet but it didn't seem to recognise it! Nowhere in the menu system does it mention anything other than wireless. Frustrating to say the least.
It might be worth asking the people you bought it from.