Category: Working Group

Hohenheim 16th of May

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We were able to accomplish almost everything we had planned yesterday.

We dismantled and disconnected the three generations of network technology that were stacked on top of each other.

We managed to clean the room to some extent with a broom we found. Once we speak to the janitor, we will find a place for all the electronic waste (see picture).

One of the switches currently in use didn’t look promising during the removal, so we will replace it this Tuesday evening (starting from 6 PM, depending on traffic).

This means that we will need to unplug the cables of the residents of Egilolfstraße 51 to 59 again, and they won’t have internet during this time. Some rooms will be offline for about an hour, while others will experience shorter outages.

Afterward, the room should be prepared for the installation of the main network connection for the entire Hohenheim area.

The relocation and upgrade of this connection still depend on the IT department of the student services.

We hope that with this cleanup operation, we have eliminated any obstacles that could potentially further delay the final resolution of the network issues in Hohenheim.

Hohenheim 15th May 2023

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In preparation for a solution to the persistent problem, we are cleaning up Egilolfstraße 57 and bringing it up to the standard required by the working group. Unfortunately, the room looks like in the pictures, so we expect it to take 2 to 4 hours. During this time, there may be intermittent network outages for certain parts of our network in Hohenheim.

We are working quickly, but you are welcome to visit us.

Hohenheim 25th of April 2023

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All Hohenheimer dormitories are connected to our network through a central hub.

Until now, this hub was located at Schwerzstrasse 2.

The building is undergoing renovation and will be without power for a while.

The plan was to relocate the hub to the newly renovated Schwerzstrasse 3.

Unfortunately, the connection between the buildings was so poor that we had to move the hub to Schwerzstrasse 1, which delayed the internet interruption accordingly. We planned for 10 minutes, but it took 3 hours.

During operation, we found that the connection there works, but is also too poor for continuous use.

Therefore, we will replace the connections again at around 12 p.m. today.

To keep the interruption short, we will send two teams. We expect the interruption to last less than an hour, ideally just a few minutes.

Update 4:50pm: Thanks to qualified feedback, an unexpected new problem that occurred during the repair of the fiber optic problem was identified and fixed around 4:30 pm. I’ll quote the translated message and thank you on behalf of the Netz-AK.

Hi, we know you’re working hard to switch over to Schwerzstraße. Since we haven’t heard anything new about the switch attempt at 12:00 since this morning’s blog post, we wanted to let you know (in case it hasn’t already been done) that if everything is back to normal, our flat still has problems. Greetings

Nevertheless, we also understand messages that explain to us that the internet is important for studying.

The fiber optic problem was traced to the edge of our network and optimized soon.

Hohenheim: Fruwithstraße and Egilofstraße from 53 onwards

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As part of the cleanup work that the Network Working Group in Hohenheim is finally able to tackle, I plan to publish some events on our blog.

Here’s a short text explaining why we’re worried about the cabling in the mentioned dormitories, since only a few have looked at the cables in their rooms.

I’ll compare the cables from the dormitories in the Hibuka building in the French Quarter in Tuebingen, where I lived extensively. There, we had cables for the doorbell at the front door (2 wires), cable for the telephone connection TAE (6 wires), cable connection (2 wires TV, 2 wires radio), and a double network socket (two cables with 8 wires each).

Why two network cables for one room? If one cable is damaged, the other can be used as a replacement, and you don’t have to lay a new cable from the room to the basement.

The TERA cabling is much more economical. Over a single cable with 8 wires, two wires are used for TV, two for the combination of doorbell and telephone. This leaves 4 wires to establish a 100 Mbit network connection.

If one wire is damaged, the internet network access is gone.

If one wire of the network cable is damaged in the French Quarter, there will only be 100 Mbit instead of 1000 Mbit or we switch to the spare cable.

Given the fact that TERA cables are only manufactured on demand and this type of cabling seems to be very rare, I assume that the savings in installation costs compared to the risks in operation have not prevailed.

From a purely network perspective, we have only half a network cable, without any reserves in the mentioned dormitories.

Nothing will change without construction activity. But building is not within the scope of our volunteer working group.

If there is a cable, we will make the best internet access possible for you.

Even though we can’t do much at the moment, please inform us about any possibly defective network connections and other problems. If only your apartment knows about a problem, nothing will improve.

Thanks for your interest,
Heinrich from the Netz-AK (short for Netzwerk Arbeitskreis = Network Work-group)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERA

Upgrade Schwerzstrasse 1

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We need to make some unplanned changes to our hardware in your basement.

We can start working from 6 PM in Hohenheim.

Your internet will be down while we work, but we’ll finish by 10 PM. After that, all rooms will be back online, and the speed will be increased to 1 GBit from the previous 100 MBit. You can check the speed by running our speedtest.

 

Pestalozzistraße 67 – Netz-AK

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Good morning!

Yesterday, 07. of March 2023, we were able to complete the wiring at about 20 o’clock.

We had started around 18:30. So if during that time “the internet was gone”, it was because there was no cable connected at our end.

Starting from the upper floors, you should have come back online when plugged in. We finished at 8pm.

In your rooms the left, oddly labelled network socket should work now.

Until yesterday, some rooms were unsystematically missing its wiring and we didn’t know which room was connected where.

Normally we announce maintenance work longer in advance, but this time it was urgent.

Please contact us if you have any problems!

Your volunteers of the Netz-AK (short for Netzwerk Arbeitskreis = Network Work-group)

A warm welcome to the Pestalozzistraße 67!

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The dormitory will be opened today and as far as we know it will go online over our network.

Unfortunately this morning we still don’t know when that will be and are waiting for the go of the StuWe technicians.

However, you are right next to the university with plenty of internet and the other dorms are all online, too.

Get to know your new neighbours, the internet will reach you soon.

As soon as the network is at your house, it works like everywhere else: You plug in your own router and create your own little network with WiFi.

Please use our tutorials and don’t buy too expensive devices (never over 40€!), but also nothing outdated to save 5 €.

Just read the tutorials!  😉

See you around
your volunteers of the Netz-AK (short for Netzwerk Arbeitskreis = Network Work-group)

Partial outage Egilolfstraße 49 & 51 2022-12-28

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Today we exchanged a damaged network switch in Hohenheim. The outage affected around 24 connections. During replacement, the connected houses in Chausseefeld and Welfenstraße were also briefly offline.

Unfortunately another device failed during restart. We can only exchange this device tomorrow on December 29th, 2022. Until then around 24 connections will be offline in Egilolfstraße.

Hohenheim 2022-12-11

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On Sunday we will be doing some work in Hohenheim.

You could be offline for at max 30/45 minutes at a time, but no longer.

Please contact us, if you have problems, we’ll wait “only” one hour in Hohenheim after we finished working.

Work will be between 11am and 5 pm on Sunday 11th of December.

Update Sunday 3 pm: Egilofstrasse shoud be up and running now. If you are still offline, reboot router and if that does not help, contact us!