A word of advice

[monroe]

Troy, I understand that you are in a difficult situation regarding power consumption, however I must give you a note of warning regarding your modem.

First of all, you absolutely should consider investing in some form of protection, one surge is all it takes to kill the thing stone dead. You probably already know this, however what you may not know is that return feedback can cause major problems with older DSLAMS that have little safeguarding in respect of this. Pushing ~10 the wrong way down a data line will likely mess up the internet for everyone using that node, and the cost of replacing it may very well be passed on to you if you're using unregulated equipment. I'm talking about a cost of well over 5k.

Second, I would, if I were you, leave the modem on constantly. Rate limiting is often heavily applied to new connections autonomously, and the more authorisation requests that are made to the node over one line, the lower that lines priority will be. In simpler terms, your bandwidth will be constantly throttled, since the node will think that a lot of devices are trying to connect to a residential account. I've seen that before personally, with an older gentleman who religiously turned all equipment off at night.

[techman]

I dont understand your comments on power surge. I am off the grid. I have a 750 AH battery bank smoothing out my power and making it pretty constant.

I cannot leave my modem on full time right now due to lack of solar power. I just am not getting enough power into my batteries in a day to allow me to run the modem day and night. Soon I hope to do so. At that time I will have to call the internet provider and have them crank my limits back up.

[monroe]

Regarding the surge issue: Your batteries may well provide a steady current at a reasonably steady power level at the output controller, however other equipment may possibly affect the overall delivery measurement, depending on consumption. Lets say, for example, you decide to vacuum whilst your laptop is powered on, the lighting is on, and you have some batteries charging. Obviously I don't doubt that you will take precautions and start your generator, however there is naturally a momentary drop in the current level at the ring. One, this is because most devices swallow more current at startup than during use, and two, because the generator may take a good half-second or so to meet the output requirements. It is at this point where the lack of protection offered by even a small capacitor circuit can potentially result in the destruction of your modem.

On top of that, if your generator over-compensates (some do, some have bleed circuits), as soon as this half second elapses and the power requirements drop again, your modem is suddenly being fed much more than it is rated for - where again a level of protection would be provided with the stock plug.

The above is only rough speculation - you may find that your mileage does indeed vary, although I would at least consider some form of surge filter, although I haven't a clue if those are produced for lighter sockets.

As for the bandwidth limiting (my forte, I work in IT for a network distributor): It's not something that is easily configurable, nor something that your ISP will likely even agree to change - it's a method of protecting their revenue (think re-sellers who do the dirty). I do, however, have an excellent solution for you: There is an ADSL modem that can be powered by a USB port - of which you should have at least two on your netbook. My method of solving this issue would be to use a USB modem, and subsequently use the netbook's own wifi card to create a wireless network, through which you can share the connection with your main laptop. Assuming that your netbook uses less power than the modem (many do use an extraordinarily small amount of power), this is potentially a semi-permanent solution for you.

I find these modems in ample supply where I am, I'd be happy to send you one along with some instructions if you so wish - PM me a suitable address.

[techman]

Ok, well for one thing, there is a HUGE buffer sitting out there. 750 AH of buffer to smooth out any voltage surges or spikes. Now I recently discovered that I can and will see a voltage dip in the wires themselves in case of turning on the inverter.

But at the batteries, where the generator is, there is no surge or spike. Its in the wires inside. I am considering a capacitor right there to stop the voltage dips.

I should never see a sudden spike but yes I am seeing higher voltages when the sun is shining brightly and the batteries are charging up. Or during an equalize mode on my charge controller. I then see the higher voltages which are not good for the modem.

I would be happy to try one of those USB modems. I never knew they existed. Thank you very much for the offer. I will pm you my address.

[hazzic]

I'm going to have to agree with Troy, trying to swing that voltage around quickly with 750AH in batteries connected (as long as they aren't fully charged) would be like trying to push around a wrecking ball. There is some significant inertia resisting change. As long as there are appropriate fact acting DC fuses everywhere and as long as connected devices can support the 11 - 16 Volt range the charge controller puts out, I think it's fine. The only thing to be careful of is to keep large intermittent loads on dedicated runs right back to the battery (as near to it as possible) and avoid tapping off existing runs so you don't drag down the voltage on the other devices on that run, or spike it up when the load is disconnected. At 12V DC, it's pretty darn easy to brown out a run if the wire gauge is too low for the load so you want large loads isolated from sensitive ones.

Anywhere devices don't support the full range, or are overly sensitive, boost/buck DC/DC regulators can offer a nice buffer quite easily and economically and are a nice sacrificial component. I think Troy might have had some conveniently delivered recently

[monroe]

A good cap array will certainly come in handy. I'll see what I can do about flashing a modem for you, I have a couple that have BT's firmware on, thus they're kinda locked down to that particular network. All else fails, I've seen a fair few that are reasonably priced, I'll get one sorted.

[techman]

A good cap array will certainly come in handy. I'll see what I can do about flashing a modem for you, I have a couple that have BT's firmware on, thus they're kinda locked down to that particular network. All else fails, I've seen a fair few that are reasonably priced, I'll get one sorted.

The more I think of it, the more I like the idea of a few super caps inside my tiny house to absorb brown outs with my inverter or other larger things turning on. It will help inside due to the longer wires.

Thanks for working on a modem for me.

[monroe]

Not a problem. Might take a week or two, I'm in a damned tight spot myself, but I'll get it sorted.

Another thing I'd like to say, might save you some frustration: Residential internet connections typically use dynamic IP addresses, meaning that whilst you can ban a particular IP address, once that changes to another IP in the allocated range, that user will be able to access the forum again. Furthermore, you might possibly end up blocking a legitimate user - or even a number of users. I, for example, am limited at the moment to using mobile broadband through my mobile telephone provider, and their solution is to share an external IP address amongst all the users of that cell tower*. If someone down the road from myself made a comment such that you decided to ban them via IP address, you would inadvertently block me as well.

Additionally, you won't necessarily get a specific address for that IP, often geolocation reveals the location of the DSLAM or point-node at which the web traffic exits the ISP's network and begins travel on the public "fibre highway". Again, an example of this: I reside in the North-East of the UK, however if you attempted to find a location via my IP address, you would most likely see a city in the midlands. This also happened with my ex-fibre provider, where my IP location was the North-West of the UK.

A better course of action that I have found through running a forum of my own is to simply perma-ban the email address used to sign up to the site. Quite often, users over around 30 tend to sign up with addresses provided by their ISP, as opposed to a service such as Hotmail - this may also help with identification. That said, M$ are usually quite helpful with assisting in the identification of Hotmail users when law enforcement gets involved - we had such a problem at my last job with a very troublesome individual, who was subsequently identified and charged with a number of offences thanks to M$.

*Some reading this may furrow their brows at this - it is achieved by using a nifty socket implementation that is actually pretty low-latency, and damned reliable. I'd hope so anyway, it's been in service for almost ten years.

[techman]

That is exactly what I do. Ban the email forever. They can keep getting new email accounts but it is a lot more work.

[monroe]

Don't I know it. I'd offer to help, but I'm only new here and it would be somewhat out of place to do so.