Route

Bit of a geeky one today I'm afraid, as you probably noticed the blog was out of action yesterday after I broke the internet. It all started quite innocently yesterday with the addition of a new backup hard drive for the office network. A simple task, just plug in and switch on, simples, then all the backups will synchronise perfectly and automatically.

So spending a day sorting out router problems was not what I wanted to do but this little addition seemed to tip our network over the edge. First the phones lost their wireless connection, then the PC's lost the t'internet and finally the speed light dipped from 100mb to 10mb signalling a problem.

Sigh. It took me a while to work it all out and ultimately discover that I needed to enter ALL the IP addresses manually to avoid conflicts and with plenty of wireless equipment that WAS fun. Secondly I stumbled across another problem of wireless interference, it seemed that several new Wifi's had been set up and was causing a bit of mayhem with two devices, again a switch to a new channel was required, the second in a year, what's going to happen when I have no more channels to switch too? The final problem was the automatic mapping of the new hard drive and the way it announced itself across the network with big heavy boots, suddenly it was everywhere and had kindly given each PC three new mapped drives interfering with the existing mapping then proceeded to back up anything it could find without asking thank you very much.

I suppose that's the way with technology today, everything is on overload. Over the years much has changed, computers have become more useful and portable changing us in ways we never thought possible. Just consider Facebook, the equivalent of that fifteen years ago would be a cork board in the kitchen the whole family used, occasionally adding photos, notes and reminders. Today it is a global cork board and the whole world is treated like a family, suddenly you have access to millions of photos, notes and snippets of other peoples lives not only that but you can access it anywhere on a myriad of equipment and that's the problem, where do you stop?

So with that in mind I went back to my network and re-evaluated it. I removed all the equipment and started from the very beginning. Utilising Dropbox, iCloud and a local cloud network hosted on the new hard drive I managed to cut the amount of devices utilising my small router. Sharing data is now done from a central point, certain pieces of equipment only have access to certain tools like Facebook for instance, dropping the amount of Facebook able technology from six pieces of equipment to just two suddenly the bandwidth became a lot less cluttered. Location services were cut down and a little tweak on the router allowed me to use a faster speed on one of the channels.

Bit of a pain to do it all yesterday and I did miss writing the blog but everything seems faster and this de-clutter has done everything some good. See? a really boring entry, at least today I'm back in the studio painting so lets have a cat with a top hat picture to finish.