Tim: >> But this was very old four-wire phone line, and no matter how far >> back I stripped the wires, one of the original pair was incredibly >> tarnished wire, that no amount of scraping, twisting, or even >> soldering, would make a good connection. So, I thought I'd try the >> obvious: Use the other pair. Same situation... It's not even >> twisted pair, it's just four wires in a jacket. James McKenzie: > Ah, good old POTS wiring. Yep, this stuff can and does corrode and > there is nothing on this planet, short of oxy-acetylene that will > 'weld' it back together. > > Yep, time for a new run, or as you said, rip out the old and replace. Well, the bodge in the middle (one wire from each pair, carrying the phone line) has been going strong for almost 20 years, now. Even ADSL is working fine through it. Looks ugly, though. The odd thing was how one wire out of each pair was badly corroded, yet the other was fine. Now I could understand one wire being bad, thanks to having 48 volts of DC through it for umpteen years. But that doesn't explain the unused, until then, alternate pair having the same condition. All I can guess would be: Bad copper when the wire was drawn, or the different coloured plastic insulation inside the sheath have different degrading chemical properties. At another time, we had a problem elsewhere with the phone wiring. The drop from the street was the old very heavy guage copper wire, and when the telecom guy replaced the terminal block, he just twirled the thin wiring to the house around the fat old wiring about three times. Loosely! No insulation, no damp proofing. The old service point, which was still quite fine (after some 30 years), was a round black thing with a flexible snap on lid. Inside, were four screw down posts. Allowing, either two lines, or a four-wire connection. The new service point, which replaced the old one when we had a new phone line installed, was some crappy plastic affair with a lid that's only held on by its own weight. It has two prongs on the top and bottom that are supposed to snap the lid in place, but the lid is bigger than the box it fits to. I've found it on the ground a few times. It's just an empty box, where they crimp wires together, and shove them in the space. Needless to say, when the phone line went wonky, I didn't bother to call the telecom company. I just reterminated the wiring, myself. I could scarcely do a worse job than their guy. Yes, twisting thin wires around fat copper can work well, if you're trying to do manual wire wrapping. But, it has to be done with a certain amount of torgue, for it work well. It was a wonder this ever worked, in the first place. > I thought we were talking about internal Ethernet Cat 3/5/6 wiring. I did say, right from the get go, about having a similar problem (to the ethernet) with our phone wiring... -- [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
