Salient Soft

I have just been notified by ZEN of the change to SOGEA in 30 days time.

Having looked into this, here are the main points:

1/ The switchover is transparent from an internet viewpoint. The internet should continue working with no change to the master socket/connection, and the FritzBox 7530 should not need any reconfiguration.

2/ I can use the RJ11 phone connector on the FritzBox as an analog phone connection to the existing BT 4600 base station by replacing the existing analogue phone cable with an RJ11 – RJ11 cable (I have already ordered one of these).

3/ Whilst the Fritz 7530 does support DECT, it appears that BT4600 handsets cannot connect to the Fritz 7530 wirelessly as a base station. This is discussed here, and appears to be due to the lack of DECT-GAP support in the BT 4600:

4/ Going forward, I would like to dump the BT4600s as they are becoming faulty/batteries failing etc. Ideally I would like some kind of local VOIP based solution as this would allow phone handsets to work anywhere we have wifi, particularly in the garden office. Otherwise, the DECT wireless network needs to cover down to the garden office, which would still be a challange, and seems unnecessary. We already have good Wifi coverage in the house and garden so it seems pointless to duplicate it for no reason. However, I have yet to find a good solution to all this.

5/ There are plenty of good DECT phones still available, per the Which? reviews here:
They even recommend the BT 4600 still, but the reviews don’t seem to mention DECT-GAP.
However, as above, I am reluctant to dive down the DECT route again as we already have good wifi coverage.

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We had a power cut recently and as a result, the Procurve 1810 switch in my garden office stopped working. After investigating, I discovered the PSU was faulty, likely blown by a voltage glitch during the power cut/restoration (it was also pretty old having been purchased in 2009). I had a spare PSU and a spare switch, but wanted to have a replacement on hand in case another one blew. I dismantled the old PSU to see if it had an internal blown fuse that I could replace. It used a very non standard screw to hold the case together, a bit like a torx but with a centre spigot. I managed to undo it with a torx, but even then the case was very hard to prise open – they definitely did not want you to dismantle it! Once I had it apart there was no fuse so I declared it completely dead.

The issue was that as the kit is proprietary HP, it uses a completely non standard DC connector on the switch that I could not find a PSU for readily anywhere. As the switch is old, there were a few places offering compatible PSUs, but I could not be certain that they had the correct DC connector. The frustrating thing was that the PSU requirement was a standard one, 12v 1.25A, which was available cheaply in many places with a standard 5.5mm x 2.1mm DC connector, and I had a spare one of these. Whilst I also had a PSU with an adapter on the end and a choice of DC connectors especially for this kind of situation, none of the choices I had matched the Procurve PSU connector.

I had a couple of the 5.5 x 2.1 soldered cable mounting female sockets so elected to chop the DC cable off the old supply and make my own adapter. I left plenty of cable length so I could easily chop the end off and redo it if the adapter went  wrong in future. Some care was needed soldering the cable socket – I used heat shrink sleeving over the centre pin joint, as the outer soldered joint was very close. I also used some larger heat shrink over the whole thing. In retrospect, I wondered if I could have added another piece of heat shrink over the outer soldered joint as well, having squeezed the end crimp solely over the outer cable run, not both. However, I think I was borderline tight as it was re getting the plastic cover on, and all the heat shrink was fine. In future I might consider just heat shrinking both connections separately and not using an outer one at all, but the tricky balance is that there is no overall cable clamp and I liked the idea of an overall heat shrink.

The existing soldered cable sockets I originally obtained from Maplin are available on Amazon here. You can also buy pre wired sockets with a length of cable (which would need an inline cable-cable-joint) but the only ones I could find were panel mount sockets rather than cable mounted.

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This follows on from my previous post here.

I had to use the mobile router backup in anger for the first time last Friday. Unfortunately, as I had not used it since 2023, the remaining minutes, existing sim and phone number had expired, as I had forgotten to periodically refresh them. After around 6 months or 179 days your sim/account hibernates, as per here. You have another 90 days to reactivate it after which it dies completely.

I therefore had to obtain another sim. I ordered a free one from EE by phone, but as this was going to take a few days to arrive, I just went to the local EE shop and bought a sim with inclusive 25Gb data pack for £15.

To manage the sim online at any time (which is the most convenient way) you register a new account with My EE here. Once you have done this, you can register the new sim with My EE by logging into your new account and selecting ‘Link a product’ and giving the SIM’s phone number. Note that a confirming text will be send to the sim phone number with a code which you must enter online. The easiest way to do this is to use a mobile to connect to the 4GEE router’s own wifi, and then visit 192.168.1.1 and login using the password you used when setting up the 4GEE mobile router. From the admin pages for the router, you can select the Status page option, which then has an SMS inbox link. This will allow you to view the text and get the confirmation code to register the SIM online. You can then select Manage Products when you log in to My EE, and your sim will appear in the list.

Note that when adding more data for the sim there is a difference between an addon as mentioned in the previous post, and a new subscription pack. The addon prices seem to be significantly more than just allowing the subscription pack to renew. You can change to another subscription pack but you have to stop the first pack completely, which you can do via a text or by visiting My EE and managing your pack(s) here. I will need to stop my pack (i.e. stop the auto renewal) within 30 days to stop it trying to renew. I believe this will still allow the minutes to be used, but the usual timeouts will apply, i.e. the data expires in 30 days for the pack that I bought.

Note also that all EE payg from March 2023 is limited to 25Mb download – I must have just missed this last time which is why I got the faster rates. As that original SIM has now died my new sim is subject to the limit. This is not too bad as the speed is still perfectly acceptable for streaming etc. The maximum is not much faster than the previous speeds of up to 20Mb that I was getting with the mobile router in the house, but as I have already set up the EZCOO usb extender, it is still worth keeping as I am still getting the best speed I can especially if reception conditions are difficult.

Also I used backup switchover ‘in anger’ – generally seems good, takes a few minutes either way. However once or twice when I turned off the mobile router completely in the Fritz internet mobile menu, the DSL popped up instantly which looked suspicious – as if it was already working and back on but didn’t show it. It does however have to be on for 30 minutes continuously in order for the auto switch from backup to happen.
At the end of the day, it is easy to switch mobile completely on or off in the menu, so manually switching over at any time if desired is straight forward, but the auto switch was pretty good.

Note that when the mobile router is in use via the fritz box, the DSL connection appears completely off/dead even if the FTTC connection is all working. You also cannot do a DSL test with the Fritz Box when the mobile backup is active, and neither can you do a full end to end test from the ZEN portal.

Re Zen diagnosis, whilst Zen were quick to respond and helpful, their outage page still showed no outage at all for our area code even when we had experienced the outage for several days intermittently, so we did not discover what the actual problem was that OpenReach were fixing. Zen did point out that you can run your own diagnostic test from the portal login, by selecting diagnostics after logging in, and then selecting (in my case) the business fibre 2 product (i.e. fttc). You then get a popup with a diagnostic link which takes you to a diagnostic test page to run a test. You can also see the history of tests either you or zen engineers have done. In my case this went back to the previous failures in 2023, all of which were there.

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This follows on from my previous post here.

Addition of a USB extender

As before, the mobile router performed around 4 times faster in the wooden garden office than in the brick build house, so it made sense to locate the router there when in use. However, I still wanted to allow shared internet around the house and on wifi when using the backup, and doing this another way e.g. by trying to share the connection from a windows PC in the garden office was not straightforward, and prevented the features of the Fritz box like its wifi from being used. I therefore obtained an EZCOO 50m USB extender for this, to allow the mobile router to still be connected to the Fritz Box in the house, but located in the garden office. When initially connecting the EE router to my TV PC via the USB extender, I received errors like “The last USB device you connected to this computer has malfunctioned and windows doesn’t recognize it”. Initially This appeared to be cable length related, as if it was a data corruption issue, as it failed on a full run to garden office with generous 7m flex cable at garden end. The full run was likely around the 50m max that was quoted by the EZCOO usb extender. However, this can also be caused by usb driver related issues. I tried to shorten the run by using the shortest cables I could each side of the Cat6 SWA run to the garden office. After this tidying up and retrying, the EE mobile router connected ok.

Significantly, I also received this error when testing the connection with my S22 Ultra mobile, again over the extender. However, when switching to using an older IOCELL Netdisk backup disk via its USB2 connection, it connected fine, which would tend to point more to driver or usb compatibility issues. Crucially, the Netdisk was able to copy significantly sized files both ways successfully over the full distance, indicating that the USB extender was working fine. Also and importantly, connecting the mobile router via the extender to the Fritz Box worked fine – the fritz box did not complain and always connected, but as always generally takes several minutes to switch over correctly between the primary and backup provider.

I continued to try file copying tests over the EE router connected to the TV PC via the extender, and these were all successful including 2-3GB copies to and from a OneDrive share. One issue that muddied the waters a lot was Windows file system caching of data both under Windows and with OneDrive – this led me to think copying had been completed when it hadn’t, or when a cache had been used to avoid the copy. Once I eliminated these issues all the tests were fine.

After retesting again today I had no problems connecting or speed testing, including tests done with the mobile router connected to the Fritz Box. I have had an occasional issue where speed test upload test did not work at all. I think that this may be a general ee mobile contention issue and perhaps if the upload link is too slow, ookla speed test just doesn’t bother and gives up.

DNS Issues

During the last couple of days, DNS has not been an issue with Zen overrides set, or by leaving the provider defaults. DNS still seems like it might be an issue, so it may be necessary to try another free public override on the DNS. The top rated free public servers are generally Cloud, Google, and OpenDNS, and details of these may be found on TechRadar here or on Broadband Genie here.

Points re topup and sim expiry

The terminology and process on this was not entire clear initially:-

• Firstly you need to purchase more credit, using a credit card, via ee.co.uk/topup . This can be done from any internet connection, by entering the mobile router phone number twice to authenticate (you don’t need a password to do this). The number was not listed in the paperwork for the router so I wrote it down on the paperwork for convenience.
• After you top up, i.e. buy credit, you need to visit add-on.ee.co.uk/purchase to get additional data using the credit you just purchased. Note that the word ‘purchase’ in the url here is ambiguous as you have already made a purchase with a credit card – you are just cashing in your credit to buy data. Note that in order to do this stage, your PC must be directly connected to the mobile router, i.e. you cannot be connected via the fritz box, even when it is in backup mode with the mobile router active. You get a choice of sizes, and you must have purchased enough credit previously to cover the size you want.
• In addition, it appears that there is a 6 month sim expiry issue for the PAYG sim used in the mobile router, as per here. You need to not just use the mobile router but also spend money every 6 months (180 days) or the SIM expires and you also lose any credit you had. You can phone EE to recover an expired SIM as detailed here, but if after 273 days you have done nothing, the sim and number expire completely and you will need a new sim and number. Therefore I decided my best option if not needing the backup for extended periods is to use it around twice a year before the 180 days expires, and buy the minimum minutes package (which is £5 at the time of writing).

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We have had this issue a number of times, where the cover keyboard just won’t work, even after rebooting several times.

This appears to be a common problem which is griped about online, and the solutions are varied, not that clear/consistent, and do not always work. I even replaced the cover keyboard, which did fix the problem at the time, but I then later found that the original one still worked!

IMO this looks like some kind of underlying bios problem.

After trying a number of ideas which did not work, including removing the keyboard driver, and disabling/re-enabling the keyboard in the UEFI bios, I found that booting into the UEFI bios (hold +volume button whilst pressing on button), and then rebooting again, seemed to work.

This site here appeared to have some helpful ideas, including running the keyboard troubleshooter, which I had not seen previously. As the troubleshooter initially said that there were no problems (!), I had to run additional troubleshooters and then select keyboard, as per the post, for it to work. In my case, the troubleshooter ran fine, but the keyboard was already working, so I’ll have to wait until next time to see if this helps to solve the problem, should it occur again.

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I obtained an EE mobile router as backup for the occasions when my main FTTC internet goes down. The main internet went down recently for and extended period due to an OpenReach Fibre connection issue to the exchange.

EE have the best mobile data coverage for my area per the ofcom coverage site here.

Zen internet sent me an EE mobile router as backup during the above outage (I presume they knew that EE had the best coverage in my area).

I was able to readily plug the router into a PC and get mobile coverage.

However, doing this via my Fritzbox 7530 needed some tweaking. The fritzbox has mobile internet backup capability via a submenu on its internet menu. This allows enabling the mobile router (plugged in via its usb port) as a backup only when the main internet is down.

Initially when I tried this having unplugged the main DSL connection, the internet showed as up, but DNS translation did not work. I found that under the internet menu/Account Information/DNS Server settings, I had overridden the DNSV4  servers provided by the ISP with specific Zen ones. Once I returned this setting to “use DNSv4 servers assigned by the internet service provider (recommended)”, DNS then worked on the mobile connection. In addition, automatic failover to mobile worked correctly when I unplugged the DSL connection, although this did take a few minutes to stabilise and was not instant.

In practice, I planned not to leave the mobile router plugged in, but to connect when needed. However, the fact that it is capable of providing shared internet and wifi via the router to my whole network was a real plus.

I found that the EE mobile router performed particularly well from my garden office (which is of wooden construction). I obtained approx 50Mb down and 1 Mb up in this situation – the down link speed was actually better than my FTTC which is around 32Mb. However in the house via the Fritzbox 7530, this reduced to around 20Mb down, presumably due to the brick construction blocking the signal more than the wooden building did.

However, in both of these situations the mobile data rate was way better than I had previously obtained by tethering my Vodafone Mobile – in the latter case, the connection was very slow and intermittent – sometimes I could not get a connection at all, so it would have been no use as a backup for remote working. The EE mobile router was perfectly suited for use as a remote working backup, although I planned not to leave it plugged in permanently as a hot backup but to manually plug in when required, as it was not instant anyway, and in practice I may have to buy additional minutes from EE as they seem to expire if you don’t use them within a set period.

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Having got CouchDB working under Windows 11 with the legacy places data as per this post here, I then wanted to run the legacy places angular and ionic apps if possible, just for reference and to consider my options going forward.

The angular app was in v6.1.7 which I did not want to revisit and upgrade. Similarly, the ionic app was an earlier legacy version which could be tricky to reinstate under windows 11.

However, I did have already built distributions for both apps, and both were able to run successfully under Windows 11 via http-server without having to install anything else. For angular I used the existing build under the dist subdirectory, and for Ionic I the build is under the www subdirectory. Note that whilst the index.html for the Ionic version did specify that cordova.js was required, and caused a load error in the web console, this was not an issue when using from a browser as it was not needed.

I did want to be able to run them remotely as well, from other PCs and mobiles. I tried installing the distributions under Zen hosting, with remote access to CouchDB running on the local PC. However, this would not run under HTTPS as it meant having mixed content – the access to CouchDB was not HTTPS and I did not want to go to the trouble of installing a self signed cert locally to get it all to work – this excercise was not worth the effort. I could not find an easy way under Zen cpanel of allowing just this app to be HTTP only, with everything else defaulting to HTTPS. If I turned off forced defaulting to HTTPS in cpanel, the app worked fine under HTTP but other access was also allowed to be HTTP only which I did not like, so I dumped the idea of hosting under Zen directly. I did hit a spate of nasty looking cpanel issues when I did this and for a while thought I had broken the domain/ssl/cpanel access entirely whilst messing with domain/alias/redirect settings in cpanel, but in the end it all worked fine again.

I therefore continued to run/host locally via http-server. I did want to be able to potentially remote boot my local PC via Fritz and access the app from anywhere, which would mean auto running the http-servers at boot time. The easiest way to do this turned out to be to use the windows task scheduler, which unlike services can run batch files without any other tools such as srvany which is commonly used to do this for services. Whilst the scheduler is often used with time based triggers, it is perfectly possible to specify a trigger as ‘run at boot time’. I also specified that it should run without any user logged in, therefore with local access only/no user authentication. This worked fine and I could boot the PC and then immediately access the places apps from a mobile without logging in.

Another trick needed was to add some remote port sharing in the Fritz box for both apps, via my static IP addresses. When doing this I also had to add a port share for the CouchDB access, otherwise CouchDB also complained about mixing private CORS stuff with the remote access. Once I did this, and changed the app config to use the remote URL for CouchDB access, it all worked fine. Fortunately, I could also continue to access the same apps locally on the hosting PC even though they were still using the remote URL for CouchDB access – it all worked fine.

I then set up redirects under cpanel from Zen to make the app access look a bit more friendly with salient soft urls, and this all ran fine.

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I had issues with this – the method proposed everywhere online was to hold the volume up key down whilst booting from cold with the power button, but I could not make this work at all, and could not enter the bios/UEFI either.

In the end I used the method detailed here fff. Right click on start, pick settings, then Update and Security, then select Recovery. Then click Restart Now from under Advanced Startup.

This worked fine, and gave a number of options which I did not explore, but the one I used was boot from usb device which gave the option of booting from a flash drive, which worked fine.

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I needed a shortcut for this as my new keyboard did not have its own sleep key like the old one.

There are various shortcuts for this which are discussed here.

My favourite one in the end has been Windows+X, then U, then S all on the keyboard, as this does not need any mouse involvement and is quick.

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I have had a repeated issue on windows 11 where my usb mouse appears to do multiple single clicks for one click, including an apparent extra click triggered by the mouse button release.

I tried a number of tricks with the settings, and also changed to another older usb mouse and replaced the original ageing mouse, but the issue persisted. I also wondered about USB port/hardware issues, and tried swapping ports several times, but to no avail.

I also tried updating the HID compliant mouse driver and the usb drivers, but in every case I was told that I was already on the latest version. In the end, I followed some online advice and removed all the HID compliant mouse drivers (as I was trying 2 mice to compare the issue). I then had to use the keyboard to navigate to a restart.

The restart reinstalled the latest mouse driver, and this completely fixed the problem. I am not sure if the issue was due to a corrupted mouse driver or corruption in its configuration/the registry somewhere, but either way, this resolved the problem perfectly.

Mouse issues like this, including possible causes and solutions, are discussed online here and also here.

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