Tag Archives: BT

Set up a cheap network storage with a USB flash drive and a BT Home Hub 2.0 in 4 steps

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This evening I put the finishing touches to my new cheap-and-cheerful network storage: a USB drive attached to my BT Home Hub 2.0 (the shiny, black one).

Step 1: USB drive

The first step was to buy a new USB flash drive. I went for this one from 7DayShop.com. It’s a 32GB USB 2.0 drive and cost me £20.99. Usefully the swivel cap comes off quite easily.

20110610-32gb-usb-drive

(When I tried this out at first I used an old 256 MB flash drive that I had in my Big Boy’s Drawer of Interesting Things™.)

Step 2: BT Home Hub 2.0

Round the back of the BT Home Hub 2.0 is a USB port. They’ve even, conveniently labelled it “USB”. Plug the USB drive into the port.

20110610-bthomehub-rear

(The dust is optional.)

Step 3: Connect with Windows Explorer

Assuming that you’re connected to your BT Home Hub, open a Windows Explorer window and enter the following network address in the address bar: \\BTHUB\Disk_a1 then hit Enter.

20110610-BTHUB-Disk_a1

Step 4: Map a network drive

To save you having to type in the network address every time you can map a network drive to that location.

In Windows 7, open My Computer and click on the “Map network drive” button on the toolbar at the top:

20110610-map-network-drive

A dialog windows will pop-up. Select a drive letter and enter the network address, as before, in the Folder input box:

20110610-map-network-drive-dialog

Then click Finish.

You now have a network drive:

20110610-network-location

Security

I’m going to use mine for backing up a few files and as a useful location for sharing documents between PC and laptop.

I imagine that this isn’t the most secure of solutions, as anyone with access to the network could gain access to the files, if they know the network address, but as a cheap and cheerful way to share files across multiple computers without the other PCs needing to be switched on this is ideal.

Update

Oddly, after a couple of weeks of this working fine I can no longer connect to \\BTHUB\Disk_a1, the PC just tells me that it cannot find the hostname.

It appears that this is not an exact science.

Telephone problems mastered

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BT master socket, next to a double power socket.

Jesus said “You cannot be the slave of two masters!” (Matthew 6:24). BT said exactly the same this morning when they discovered that someone had tried to wire a second master socket to our original master socket.

At 08:30 a BT OpenReach engineer turned up at the door — not the cheeriest engineer that I’ve ever met — and got to work testing our master phone socket in the hallway.

Open(Reach) investigation

A few minutes later he asked if we’d installed our own Sky TV box. “No,” said I, “Why?” He showed me that someone had wired an extension socket into the back of the master socket, and that it was done in such a terrible way that it was clear to him that it hadn’t been done by a qualified BT engineer.

We assured him that we’d only been living here for five months, we didn’t have Sky TV, hadn’t been poking screwdrivers and wires into the back of the master socket, and that all we had connected was a telephone, the router and an answering machine.

Eureka!

It turns out that the problem was our answering machine. It turns out that the problem was our answering machine because whoever had wired in that rogue extension socket had wired in another master socket (at least that’s what I think he muttered) and that it had short-circuited our telephone line and completely knackered our answering machine in the process.

So now we have a phone line again, but no answering machine (other than the invisible BT 1571 service in the sky … but not Sky, because, as I’ve already established, we don’t have that).

We’ll just have to wait now to see whether we’re charged the £110+ call-out charge plus £99 per hour for someone else’s poor telephone wiring. But if we are and it goes any way towards solving our poor broadband connections — and allowing me to blog about something else for a change!! — then it will be money well spent.