and things went downhill from there

Saturday morning started with me fighting our home network. Ever since I updated the basement server to Windows 10, it has become a constant fight to keep it on the network. Even before the phone company replaced our modem with a modem/router, it had been a bit unreliable. I managed to get the basement server to see the network, and then in the middle of transferring some files, it died again. I tried removing and reinstalling the drivers for the little USB adapter I was using to connect it to our wireless network, but although I could get it to connect and work for awhile, it would just as quickly disconnect. Even when it connected, the transfer rate was abysmal.

Half the time, Windows did not even want to recognize the adapter and mapped it out to one of those 169.254.#.# addresses.

Then something bigger came up, and I put the network aside. I was just getting ready for a shower when atara came running upstairs and calmly complained that the sewer was backed up again. Well, except for the calm part. The only reason it had not backed right into the basement is because the basin had filled up to the level of the weeping tiles, so our sewage was flowing out under the house. Lovely. I called the same plumbers as we had out the last time, and they snaked out the tree roots that had been blocking it. Normally they only sent out one guy, but this one had an apprentice.

I asked him if the problem might be because our drain had collapsed. Our front yard has sunk dramatically right at the edge of our property line, but he assured me that if the drain had collapsed, the metal bit on the end of the snake would have sustained considerable damage. He said that they had to extend >48' before they encountered roots, and by his estimates that would put it right where our line joins the city sewer. He opined that our elm tree was the likely culprit, and he also mentioned that it is not unusual to have to clear the outside line every couple of years in older parts of town like ours.

We are still toying with the idea of hiring a company to run a camera down the length of the pipe for our peace of mind. Replacing the front walk is one of the tasks on our radar, and we do not want to go to the expense of replacing it, only to have to dig it up again a year or two later to replace the line.

I was dredging through some of my older pictures today, looking for ones that I had not previously posted for one reason or another. I took a fancy to this one that I shot back in '07 during the Red River Exhibition.


This was my picture of the day from Friday. I shot it out the front window of the car a few blocks from home. As you can see, Spring is still a ways off for us.


I had this setup running when I first started tackling our network issues last week. I was trying to determine if the problem was with the server in the basement, or with our range extender in the hall (which is actually an ASUS router which I re-purposed). I fired up my old Dell laptop because it had some software that let me find the address of the repeater on the wireless network. Alas, I apparently forgot to set a password, so unless I do a factory reset, I am effectively locked out of it.

I set up the Surface next to it to see if I could get the software to work on that, since it is considerably smaller, faster, and less unwieldy. The old Dell really owes me nothing after all these years, and other than being a bit slow to start up, it is still reliable as heck. The contrast between technology separated by ten years is quite striking.

We recently purchased a wireless router to replace the pocket router/access point that we've been using for our notebook computers.  I have come up with a plan on how to wire the lot up, but I have a question about how XP and the network will function if I wire it that way, and I was hoping that some of you folk could chime in (since most of you are more tech-savvy than I am).

The way we have them wired right now is interesting, but not that unusual.  We have both computers directly wired together with a CAT5e crossover cable, giving us 1GB file and printer sharing across an IPX network.  Both computers also have a 100MB TCP/IP wired connection to a router, with the file/print sharing disabled.  We have a pocket router configured as a secure wireless access point plugged into the router, which allows our notebook computers to connect to the internet with their onboard wireless LAN.

The way that I am thinking of wiring it is very similar with only a couple of small, but significant changes.  I'm going to leave the crossover connection untouched, but I am planning to enable file and printer sharing on the TCP/IP connections to the new wireless router.  The idea is to give our notebooks access to the file library and printer on our home network.  This is a bit less secure than our configuration above, but the router has a hardware firewall, and we have software firewalls running on all four machines, so my thinking is that if I put fairly secure password protection on the connection then we should be reasonably safe.

I've done up a visual representation of the current and proposed networks below.

The question: Is there a way to instruct Windows that it should only share files on the desktop systems across the 1GB connection?  Does it have a preset order in which it will cycle through network connections in order to choose the ones it needs (e.g., by network card ID, connection number, network type - IPX vs TCP/IP - etc.)?  Is there a different way to wire this up in order to make the question moot?  (With the assumption that we'll still have a 1GB connection between our desktops at the end of the day.)