Not had a very good weekend for broadband connectivity this last weekend. On Thursday and Friday I took a couple of days off work so that I could redo some wiring in the spare bedroom where the computer equipment is located along with the DSL point; this involved moving the light switch, adding a new double socket and replacing a single socket with a double. To do this I obviously had to turn all the equipment off.

The rewiring went fine (makes a big difference when you’ve got the right tools, like a wall chaser!), but we needed to let the plaster dry so the electricity had to stay off. What I’d forgotten was that I’d volunteered to trial some new software for my Effecient Networks DSL router some weeks earlier and BT chose this day to be the day to phone me up and ask if I could let them install the new software.

So we let the plaster dry off a bit more and after lunch turned on the power and all was fine. I turned on the equipment and all was fine (fortunately the router’s power supply didn’t go pop this time!), and after a few minutes I saw that the router was being rebooted. All went well and was fine.

On Saturday I noticed that the router had been disconnected from BT’s ATM network and couldn’t reconnect. I spent a few minutes on the phone to Demon Support and as we were trying to diagnose where the fault might be it managed to reconnect!

Seemed to work okay on Sunday, though I was out most of the day. Then today at around lunchtime I noticed I could no longer see my mail server from work. Unfortunately Louise was ill and wasn’t answering the phone so I couldn’t find out what was going on. But when I got home Louise told me that BT had been installing new telegraph poles down the road and had reconnected our line (in fact they’ve taken a line away that wasn’t being used). So that explained the outage this afternoon. But then this evening the router lost it’s connectivity again. Logging in using the BT test login didn’t work but rebooting the router did, so I’m beginning to suspect that the new software on the router may be a bit buggy. I shall tackle BT about this tomorrow so watch this space.

In case anyone reads this that is using an Effecient Networks Flowpoint DSL Router, the new software revision is 5.3.175 (which you’ll see on the connection page by pointing the browser at the IP address/name of the router).