Recently Orange (my isp) sent me a LiveBox, an all in one wireless router solution for my broadband package.

I used to use an old pc running smoothwall connected to a little wireless router I was given. I moved away from the Linux solution (I kind of wished I hadn’t now) cos: a) The disk on the old pc was starting to go a bit flaky and b) I had to run a cable upstairs as there was no room for it near the phone socket.

The Livebox wasn’t to bad (apart from a crap wireless signal strength), until i tried to connect my Wii to it. The Wii connected to the web fine under my old setup, so I thought it would under this one. I was mistaken.

Doing a scan reveled my network ok, so i gave it my WEP key, it did it’s test and kept coming back with a variety of error message. I did a quick Google on the matter and it turned out that other people have had the same problem. I tried a couple of there solutions but all they did was result in a different error code.

I was certain is was something to do with security, and just befor I turned of all the encryption on the livebox i noticed something on the Wii, on the screen where you input the key. It said the security was WPA-PSK (TKIP, as you can see from the screen shot

As far as I could tell, the Livebox was using WEP. So, I hit the Change security settings option, selected WEP, input my key and it connected! Problem solved, more by luck than judgment.

Just a quick post to mention I managed to get my data back of my external usb hard disk I thought I had lost. I downloaded an app called Partition Table Doctor from http://www.ptdd.com

As soon as I ran it, it found my external disk, and said it could repair the partition on it. It did its stuff, I saved the partition back to the disk rebooted and I could see the disk again.

It only cost $40, so its well worth it!

Its been a bit of a shit day today. The people who look our building decided to do some work on the air conditioning systems today. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except they didn’t tell us what they were doing, and the only air con that seamed to be affected was in our main server room!!

It started to get mightily hot in there, at one point it got up to 38C, we had various fans in there but nothing seamed to be getting rid of the hot air. The best thing seamed to be getting a long foil tube, putting one end over a large fan situated at the back of the racks, and the other end out of the door. This got rid of a lot of heat until the portable air con’s turned up.

We managed to get away with very little initial problems, the watchguard firewall overheated, switched itself of and lost its config, various server lost disks and everything was reporting heat warnings.

The only complete failure was a Dell poweredge 750 server that was running websites for our editorial system. This went down, and refused to power up again while it was still in the rack. We moved its services onto another server, and when it got a bit quieter we took the server out of the rack. When we got inside it, we found a section of the main fan had broken off completely, and fan blades had been tossed all over the server!

So we got the fan out of the housing, and it looked as though the bearing had gone, so the fan was lose in the casing. Presumably the blades had hit something and this is how they snapped off.

We then looked into Dell IT assistant and one of its last temperature warnings was at 88C, no wonder a couple of hours later the CPU was still to hot to touch.

So let this be a lesson, always make sure your air con and its backup units are in working order!

Been doing some work this week trying to get a faxing solution working using our VOIP (voice over ip) systems. We were trying to come up with a solution we could use as a group, that would allow users to have there own number for clients to send to, and the fax would be delivered to the user as an email.

We read up about fax over IP, it does exist but apparently its not very good, the line has to be clean with no noise otherwise the fax machines cant handle the call. Due to the fact we would be using the VOIP network we decided not to pursue this route, and to attach an ATA device to the VOIP network and then to a normal analogue modem. The ATA just lets you use normal analogue phone/faxs/modems on the VOIP network.

What we then wanted to test, was if we could get caller ID information out of the modem, the idea being that if caller ID was working then we should be able to get out the number the customer has called, so we know where to route the email.

Using a Hyperterminal session to the modem, we called the modem. If the caller ID is being passed then, between the first and second ring the caller ID info should pop up. This is where the real fun began.

The first few times we rang it nothing came through. Doing a bit of research, quite a lot of modems didn’t support caller ID in the UK, and most of them didn’t have the feature turned on by default. Looking round the web, we found a couple of commands to try on the modem to turn on caller ID, they were

AT#CID=1
AT%CCID=1
AT+VCID=1
AT#CC1
AT*ID1

After now managing to turn it on, we rang the modem, and hey presto the caller id came through! Just as we thought we were getting somewhere we found another problem. If we rang the modem, hung up and rang it again within about 5-6 seconds the caller id didn’t come up. Wait about 15 secs and it worked again. We tried this with two different modems and the same things happened again.

So the caller id was’nt very reliable going over the VOIP network and through the ATA box. We then got the VOIP guy to try and get it to send the called number anyway, he turned it on, we sent a fax but the info didn’t come through to Windows Fax services. At this point we started to realise our idea might not work very well.

Next week we will probably play about with it a bit more, but looks like we are going to have to do it another way. The other ideas we have or try and use Fax over IP to see how well it actually does work, you get get some modules for Hylafax etc so we might try that. The most likely option i think we will do is use a ISDN30 , attach the lines to that and put a card in the server. We know this option works as one of our other centre’s currently uses this method.