The box came via FedEx on Saturday afternoon. It was nice of NetSys to specify Saturday delivery at no extra charge. Inside the outer packaging were two boxes taped together, one for the local half of the network extender and the other for the remote half. Although I couldn’t figure out how to do it on the NetSys website, it looks like the company is set up to ship the products separately.
Inside each box was the unit itself, significantly larger than the NetSys extenders that I was replacing, a short Ethernet cable, a short telephony cable with an RJ11 connector at each end, and a wall wart power converter. In one of the boxes was a mini CD containing the user guide. On the label of the mini CD was the default LAN IP addresses and passwords for both the local and remote units.
There was no paper manual. That’s okay, I understand that such things are expensive, and often not used by the customer. There was not even a single page set of quick start instructions. I don’t like that. It’s a pain to copy over the CD manual to a computer and then have to look at it with Acrobat. It wouldn’t cost NetSys much to put a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper in the box.
I put the remote unit in the garage, connected it to the satellite transceiver with the Ethernet cable, and to the category three wiring leading to the utility room with an RJ 11 cable to the line port. I went to the utility room, and connected the local unit to the firewall with the Ethernet cable and to the category three wiring with an RJ 11 cable to the line port. I attached the wall wart, and plugged it in to UPS. Then I went back to the garage and plugged in the remote.
I saw power lights on both units. I saw Ethernet activity lights on both units. The link status light on both units was blinking green. I had no idea what that meant. I tested for connectivity by logging into the firewall administration console. The firewall had not received any Internet configuration information from the DHCP server in the satellite transceiver.
I needed to find out what the blinking green light meant. I copied the manual to the documentation share on the server, and started to read it. I had made a fundamental mistake: my definition of remote and local was exactly opposite NetSys’s. It seems their model is that you have an existing network connected to the Internet, and a single computer or small group of computers at a remote location that you wish to be able to share that Internet connection. My model was a remote satellite antenna that you want to be able to access from a local network.
I surmised that the system should have basic functionality connected either way, but since the NV-600s have asymmetrical bandwidth, I should really turn them around. I installed the local unit in the garage and the remote in the utility room, connected them up and turned the power on. The link status light was still blinking.
I looked in the manual and found that the blinking light meant a marginal connection. This didn’t seem right, since I was operating the unit at roughly 1/10 of the distance that it specified for.
I started to trace out the wiring, and found that the two ends of the category three cable had no physical connection. When I was troubleshooting the previous NetSys connection I tried a couple of different pairs, and I had left the two ends connected to adjacent pairs. Apparently, the cable crosstalk was enough for the two Ethernet extenders to declare that they had a partial connection. I connected both ends to the same pair, and everything works fine.
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