Rain, Rain and the internet

 When, back in 2004, I briefly worked for what was then CSIRO’s sustainable ecosystems division, I remember that in the foyer of the office building they had the second verse of Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ on the wall

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeping plains

Of ragged mountain ranges

Of droughts and flooding rains

Well drought has been noticeable by its absence this week, it has been more a week of flooding rains, so much so that when driving back from Lake View last week it was like driving through a car wash.

We havn’t suffered any real damage except that the possums have discovered the zucchini plants, possibly due to them having difficulty foraging for food, and I was forced to reinstate my vegetable cage from last year after the plants were severely nibbled.

And then, when I was up at the Athenaeum on Friday we had no internet.

Being me, I flipped into technician mode, power cycled the modem, and then the NBN box to no effect. Basically, there was an orange light labelled ODU on the NBN box that stayed resolutely orange, and I guessed that that was the source of the problem.

I had no idea what ODU meant, and the Athenaeum’s connection is a wireless one.

I’d only previously dealt with variants of fixed NBN infrastructure and was unfamiliar with how wireless internet was deployed.

Googling via my phone showed that an orange ODU light meant a problem with the outdoor unit, ie the antenna and transceiver unit on the roof.

Looking at it from ground level, it seemed fine, but the storm had been so devastating with local flooding and trees down, anything could have happened, especially as the antenna is not totally passive - for example water could have got in and caused something horrible to happen to the transceiver electronics.

The connection is provided as part of the council’s communications contract with Telstra - the Athenaeum is a council owned building - which meant we couldn’t log a call with Telstra - some one in the council’s IT division had to.

So a game of telephone tag took place trying to find who could log a call - eventually when we did so we also found the answer to our communications problem - NBNCo had taken Stanley offline for maintenance, and of course no one had thought to pass the message on.

Still, as a learning experience it was useful, especially if we do have a serious problem down the track.

Other than that I did very little at the Athenaeum, but down at Lake View I documented some more of the contents of the dining room, including using kid’s beanbags as a support to avoid stressing the spines of older in period books used to dress the house.

The same technique, using kid’s beanbags, will again almost certainly be useful when later down the track we photograph the more interesting bits of grafitti in the pile of rather tatty bibles and prayerbooks acquired from local deconsecrated churches ...