WAY OT: phones, et al (was Re: OT: click license (was Re: Software Licensing and Sanity (was...)))

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Bill Vermillion done said:
> 
> Not since the DCMA went into force.  Now you can look at the code
> without violting the law let alone modifying it.  There are

I think you meant "cannot".  :)

> software engineers from from foreign countries who will NOT travel
> to the US for fear of being arrested and imprisoned for DCMA
> violations.

Alan Cox comes to mind.

> None of the sites was willing to provide information for the person
> to be prosecuted.  And that person had the gall to post on the SCO
> newsgroup one time and mention he was an authorized reseller.

Now there's stupidity in action.

> That sounds like one of your devices may be loading the line too
> much.  You don't see problems like this much anymore but in the
> past - before all the transistorized logie - you'd see a number on
> the bottom of the device that was the ringer equivalence. I forget
> the number that was 'magic' but if you totalled up the devices and
> they went past the magic number you'd probably wind up with nothing
> working.

We've taken all devices off the line though.  It happens with one at a time
or all at once.  There are only three.  We even ruled out the splitter back
here and even swapped out microfilters on the chance it was going bad (I've
had one die before...they can).  No joy.  It's not internal.

> The hum sounds like you may have a stray ground or capacitance.
> If BS comes and it's our problem not theirs you get to pay for the
> service call.

They swore to me it's not internal.  They say they know where the problem
is.

> You could have had a spike somewhere that caused a device to go bad
> that would cause this.

Like I said, we pulled all devices, right down to the DSL modem itself.  We
get it with any of them.  I highly doubt that our two different model GE
phones -and- my USR Sportster v.90 all bit the dust the same day.

> And if you have had a lot of rain recently then maybe the ground is
> wet enough to cause some a slow leak to let moisture in and you are
> getting crosstalk from other users.

There was a storm the day it happened, but the real bad one wasn't until
later that night after this had already started.

> It's 'somewhere' on the main cable.   You must have a backwoods
> telephone company.  If there is a problem on the line they can use
> time delay measurements and can usually pin-point the spot on
> the the line where it is bad within about a foot - on a line that
> is 1000+ feet long.  

They may know.  They say they do.  You know how these companies
are--they'll not tell you anything they don't feel you need to know.  It's
BellSouth for chrissakes, you think they'll actually cooperate reasonably?
:)  And if you know they can pinpoint that accurately, then I've no reason
to believe they're lying to me about it being external.  They've never
knocked on our door, and in fact said they don't need anyone here to fix
it.  All indications are that it's outside on their cable before the
demarc point.

Now I got a callback this evening to my cell and the supervisor said it
should be fixed tomorrow morning.  They didn't reiterate the 10am, but they
made a reference to being behind "in that area", so this seems like it may
be related to a series of storms we've had.

> In that case you may find them with a little machine to drill under
> the earth and pass you a new cable.  "could not fix" often means a
> new cable run, so they have to schedule a truck with cable to do 
> a reinstall.

The lines here are all above ground.  The chase from the phone pole to the
building is a 40-foot span of cable that's less than sufficiently shielded.
SFAIK, nothing around this neighborhood is actually underground.  I could
be wrong, but I know exactly where our iines come in from, and it's off the
top of a pole, over to the 2nd storey, and then down to a break-out box
outside the building for the complex.  

> That's not hard to figure if you look at how things are handled.
> Voice is basically carried on bare copper and must be able to carry
> a current.  DSL is more like RF.  Not a great analogy but I hope
> you get the idea.   

Explains why with that nice 40' span, whenever there's a storm my DSL gets
flaky and bursty, not to mention drops like a rock.  Doesn't even have to
be terribly close sometimes...just like 45min on either side of being over
us will do it.

> That was putting  a load on the line and acting like a low-pass
> filter diverting the high-frequences [DSL works above 10K] to
> ground.  Whoever installed that did you a dis-service by NOT
> putting in the micro-filters.  When our micro-ISP was reselling DSL

*dry cough*  I was the one that put in filters.  I had put one on each
device initially.  I didn't even remember the Caller ID box was -there-.
Once I found out, I just moved one filter to the jack side and wired
everything out from there and *poof* it was fixed.

> we MADE SURE that filters were everywhere.   Best way to handle
> DSL is to split the line where it enters the building, and put the
> microfilter there and make sure nothing else gets on the line you
> run to the DSL modem.

Yeah, well...we don't have -that- kind of control.  They offered to split
our line for us initially before I found the problem, except that 40'
expanse was nothing the ISP could do a thing about--they're not allowed to
hang cable, it would have had to go along the ground.  Sha, right.

> > Oh, and as a sidebar that may actually be relevant to some
> > here, I recall Tony Ryder having problems with VPN over his
> > DSL a few months back. I -think- we traced that to his circuit
> > being PPPoE and the extra encapsulating layer making VPN not
> > viable, when it would work fine from his colleague's bridged
> > DSL. When I asked someone more knowledgeable about it, I was
> > told that the PPPoE encapsulation may in fact affect that and
> > probably would, it pretty much verified it as far as I was
> > concerned.
> 
> That's all SW not HW. :-)

Agreed, but it's -policy- with them.  BS flat-out does PPPoE, and now
they're mandating that their reseller ISP customers are given that as well.
At least here.

mark->
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