www.nickhodge.com

Hav­ing an online job I really should have no excuses to be offline.

Wifi Eth­er­net, paid or unpaid, can be a little like find­ing a needle in a needle factory.

Solu­tion: Popped into a Dick Smith and pur­chased a USB NextG Card.

Why Big­Pond? Microsoft’s mobile phone/data sup­plier is Tel­stra, and Cathye con­vinced me to do it over lunch.

Symp­toms: I could register the card and account; how­ever the IP address that was cre­ated was always a 169.254.x.x. The card was suc­cess­fully seen with the Big­Pond soft­ware 2.7.3

After a week of work­ing with the sup­plied soft­ware, includ­ing a very friendly sup­port guy at Tel­stra Big­pond, I’ve decided to search out for fur­ther info.

Whilst I ran out of time to hunt down the root cause of the issue; it seems that the Vista install at Microsoft has some ser­i­ous group policy restric­tions on net­work­ing: so it’s work­around time.

In this pro­cess of look­ing for the solu­tion, I turned off Vista’s UAC. That is a pretty big switch. Sort of like leav­ing your secur­ity alarm off when you leave home. I didn’t feel safe. UAC back on.

The card is dis­trib­uted in Aus­tralia by a com­pany called Maxon. They have a sup­port forum. 20 minutes of read­ing, and there is a work-around. The card itself maps into Win­dows as a Port, and using the nor­mal dial-up/PPP set­ting — you can just dial into the net­work and you are off.

(this post via Big­Pond NextG)