On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 13:43 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Just to keep the story up-to-date, > a third modem/router from TI (Telecom Italia) > seems to have solved the problem completely; > the connection has held up for a day so far. > > The history is a little puzzling to me. > The connection worked perfectly for a couple of years, > until last December when it suddenly stopped completely. > A technician came round (a very rare event) > and tested the line. > He said the line was fine and told me to change the modem > at a TI agent in a neighbouring town. And had anything else changed in your system at that time? A friend of mine would consistently lose connection every time he started burning a DVD. I would lose connection whenever I had a USB hard drive plugged in. It had one of those crappy power boxes in the middle of a cord, and it just radiated crud. I could cause the fault to happen with 100% reliability, just by having the drive plugged into a computer. e.g. Take a computer system off the network, just plug the PC into the mains, a monitor into the PC (and the mains), and the USB drive into the PC (and it's power brick into the mains). The OS didn't even have to be booted. The moment the connection was made, or the power turned on, the modem would disconnect. And continuously fail while trying to reconnect. This test computer wasn't connected to anything else, and the fault would occur no matter where I plugged into into power in the house. Yes, all the gear was earthed (PC, monitor, and USB drive all had equipment ground going to mains earth), and the mains earth line is working. I could even do it by plugging the USB drive into a laptop running off batteries, so the USB drive was the only thing connected to the mains, in any way. I'm rather loathsome of switchmode power supplies being put into everything, these days, especially where they're not really needed. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
