Well, I'm back home and mostly unpacked now. So what needs attention...? Only the computers at home. Firstly, the hard drive on the parents machine has failed. So I've spent a little while recreating the system for them on a new hard drive.
The more interesting problem is the home network. We were using a combined wireless router and ADSL model (Zyxel 600 series if you're interested). Unfortunately, the modem bit seems a bit faulty and keeps dropping the connection.
Looking for a simple fix, I managed to find the modem our ISP supplied to us. Thankfully is has an ethernet port on the back. So my plan became piggy back the wireless router on the modem connection.
Sound simple, right? Well... it's not as easy as that. To force the router to route traffic via. the modem, I had to make use of the backup WAN settings. This allowed me to specify an alternate gateway for if the DSL connection failed. That's ok so far. Now to simulate failure. This was done by simply removing the phone cable from the router and inserting it in the modem. The router should now attempt to ping google every so often on a connection without a cable. I think you can guess the outcome of that one... constant failure.
Thankfully it works but I'm very surprised I had to simulate failure to get the unit to do as I wished. It's a bit easier doing this and using the built-in DHCP server rather than going manual and having to change the gateway on every machine on the network.
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