Day 3!
Got home last night and opened the Home Hub box… well it’s cheap, but kind of classy! I thought about it for a while before finally cracking and deciding to install it. My reason for the U-Turn was that I figured that installing the BT supplied router might kickstart the incrementing of my IP profile.
I plugged all the wires in and left it for the prerequisited 1hr… I didn’t think I actually needed this as the internet light had done it’s blinking and gone stable after about 2 mins… well I guess it would as my previous router had already been talking on the new adsl line for a few days. But leave it I did, don’t want anyone pointing at a failure and saying it was because I hadn’t followed the letter of the sexual assault lawyer in Houston, TX.
A hour later I stuck the CD into my machine and waited for the install to kick in… it didn’t… my machine couldn’t read the disc, so I put the disc in another machine and it fired up ok. The install process proceeded; it decided that I could connect through the wireless or wired. I chose wireless as wired is actually impractical; my study is not the place where the ADSL master socket is, and therefore where the Hub is situated, I only have wireless connection and no Cat-5 ethernet socket, and there is no USB cable in the world that stretches the distance required…
The install found my Hub and I put the wep key in… didn’t work, it couldn’t connect. Retried it a number of times with no success.
So, I clicked on my Wireless Network connection and set it up manually on both machines… both machines could see each other but not the internet. So the wireless was working but something on the hub wasn’t setup correctly; I figured I needed to complete the installation somehow.
I shared the CD drive on the machine that could read the disc and started the install over the network on the other machine… same result!
There was no other choice but to somehow connect in a wired setup! Luckily I found I had an old phone extension, not one that you would want to run your adsl router on all the time, but one that would at least allow me to get the Hub and computer in the same room without luggin all the computer equipment out of the study.
Connected machine and Hub with the USB cable and started the install again… everything went through ok. Once the install had finished I could connect to the internet AND the wireless connection worked fine.
There was one problem… the install program had littered my machine with YAHOO crap! It had replaced my IE7 browser with its own that required login and stuff. I managed to uninstall that and get IE7 back, but it then had toolbars and sidebars and leftbars and downbars… I think I got rid of all that by disabling and uninstalling… however on reboot the BT Helpdesk desktop no longer worked correctly, missing function in some groupon coupons DLL… so I had to uninstall that as well!
My machine was now connecting correctly and nicely sans YAHOO.
The Home Hub comes with a unique factory preset SSID name and Wep key, it also comes with BROADCAST name on by default. I know this because I can see all the SSID’s of houses around me! So I fired up the Hub Manager but was unable to get into the advanced settings… it seems the Hub Manager doesn’t work with IE7! Connected to the Hub through Firefox and turned off the Broadcast feature, noticed that I could change the name and Wep key also; tweaked some other settings, setup the Application routing for FTP, Remote Desktop, and my SVN Server… to be honest, that all went pretty smooth and neatly.
No option for updating DynDns though… I know the router can do it, as the options are there when you telnet to the hub, but that method is way too complicated and I didn’t understand how to do it… I only knew about the telnet option because I read it here…
Anyway, flicked over to a href=”http://www.dyndns.org/”>DynDns and found that there is an update client that will do exactly what I wanted. Which by the way is to inform DynDns of my IP address every time it changes…
So, so far so good… the speed issue isn’t resolved, still capped at 2mb, but I can wait…
In Summary…
Install with a Wireless setup doesn’t work very well.
Installing all the YAHOO stuff sucks!
No obvious DynDns support.
Easy to use Hub Manager.
No IE7 Support on Hub Manager.
BT Broadband, BT Home Hub, Home Hub, ADSL
Thanks for this.
My installation went a lot quicker – but I was puzzling how to get into the advance settings to turn off SSID broadcast and change the network name and WEP key. Will try now using Firefox.
To access Advanced Menus – user name & password both ‘admin’
home hub is poo i cant even get in to the home hub manager
I just got a BT Home Hub a few weeks back and mine is also capped at about 2mb at best, (should be 8) although i have been testing it every few days at http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/speedtest/ as it says in the manual that it could take ten days to establish the fastest connection possible. But the most annoying thing, and I mean SUPER ANNOYING, is the fact that every couple of minutes when i try to get onto a site it tells me that my hub is not connected to the phone line and gives me the option to “try again”, but upon clicking the “try again” link it just says the same. After a few more clicks it gives me the option to click a link called “connect to the internet”, upon doing this it usually (9 times out of ten) takes me back to the “try again” screen, and on the odd occasion that it says “connection succesful” it lasts only a few minutes before i am shown the “your hub is not connected” screen again and the process begins again.
All in all i think the only thing left to say is, if you were planning on getting one, then don’t bother.
I’m having the same problem. Anyone else out there?
During the day and evening it constantly disconects my internet access although when moving my cursor over the icon it shows me as connected to the home hub but internet connection is lost.. Its driving me insane. Speak to bt only to be told ‘it shouldnt do that’ which is a huge help.. asked for and got a replacement.. still does the same thing.. me thinks bt home hub is a waste of money.. Tied in to a years contract though so could be stuck with it for another 11 months.. thank god i chose the 12 month and not the 18 month option
Michael,
I have this same problem now – but not with a Home Hub. My computer drops the inet connection but states that it has a good connection to the wireless router – however it can’t actually talk to the router when I try to fire up the admin panels. At the same time my Vista laptop can connect to the router and the internet without any problem.
I suspect there is a driver/usb/xp internet stack problem! 🙁
I have had the home hub with phone since march, I have the same
problems even now, cost me lots in phone calls , to be told to unplug
wait 1 minuet and plug back in to clear a build up of static, I have vista and wired by ethernet.
I installed my BT home hub with no problems. set up wireless and again had no problems. some times my home hub disconnects, this is because of static. but it only takes 2 Min’s to unplug and put back in…so what is the big deal about that. I have no problems in the middle of gaming etc, because I always unplug and reset before gaming. this can be done whilst I make a coffee, or grab a beer!
The BT home hub does come with lots of yahoo crap! I am a user of Ccleaner, so I removed lots of things from the start up list so my PC continues to fire up fast with no problems.
Wired I am capped at 2meg, wireless I am getting 6.3 meg 🙂
I will give them an 8 out of 10. maybe a 9 if it didn’t come with all the unnecessary yahoo junk!
The BT home hub does come with lots of yahoo crap! I am a user of Ccleaner, so I removed lots of things from the start up list so my PC continues to fire up fast with no problems.
ccna