Power Outages and Your Computer and Related Equipment

Late last year late one night I had a power outage. It was not a common area outage, or caused by an event such as a storm – mine was the only property impacted. It was repaired the next morning; it seemed to me that the cause was old cables which you think Energy Australia would monitor as part of any ongoing maintenance of infrastructure program. There was no explanation from Energy Australia other than the fault external to my property was repaired and my electricity was back on and my appliances all connected.

The problem was that the outage had blown two pieces of equipment a Netcomm ADSL Router as well as a Netgear Rangemax Wireless Router . I contacted Energy Australia and they advised that I must complete a Network Investigation Report for any compensation claim. I immediately did so. Several weeks later although Energy Australia had advised a far earlier response I received a form letter stating that myclaim had been rejected without any explanation.

Although my equipment is connected via an Anti-Surge Power Board, this still not on this occasion stop the problem and through no fault of my own I was up for a few hundred dollars to replace my ruined equipment.

It should be noted that occurrences like this may be covered under your Home Contents Insurance as long as part of your policy includes Fusion cover.

In conclusion all your equipment should be connected using a Surge Board, and you should look at your current insurance cover.

Although, these things are not in my experience regular events, they still do happen. It is my considered opinion that companies like Energy Australia should compensate customers when such events occur. People pay a high enough and in future increasing tariff for electricity and should be entitled to a reliable level of service and if something goes wrong to pay any cost associated with in this example affected equipment.

ADSL Modems and Routers – IP Address, Username & Passwords for Major Manufacturers

When you purchase a new ADSL modem/router you may have to manually access the device to setup your ISPs username and password to get your Broadband connection operating.

Using Internet Explorer (can also use any other web browser) in the address bar type ipaddressforrouter and hit the ENTER key (http:// at the start is generally not necessary) to access your hardwares ‘web management interface” or ‘configuration page’.

Manufacturer	IP Address	Default Username	Default Password
Belkin:	10.1.1.1 or 192.168.2.1 (depending on model)	Admin OR admin	Leave password area blank OR admin
Billion:	192.168.1.254	admin	admin
DLink:	10.1.1.1	admin	admin
Dynalink:	192.168.1.1	admin	admin
Linksys:	192.168.15.1	admin	admin
Netcomm:	192.168.1.1	admin	admin
Netgear:	192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 (depending on model)	admin	password

N.B. Depending on your model, the details listed in the table may differ; therefore refer to your manual or the manufacturer’s website. As you can see from the above table these manufacturers use very similar, if not identical IP addresses to access and default usernames and passwords are the same also.

The most important thing you can do is to change both the name and password the first time you access this hardware, providing greater security.

To check your IP address once equipment connected you can go to your MSDOS Prompt Command (under Accessories in Windows XP) or Start Run (under Windows Vista), type ‘cmd’ without the apostrophes and in the new window that opens type in ‘ipconfig’.

I look forward to any comments on this or any other Blog.

Happy Computing.

Geejay