I recently stumbled upon the firmware page for the Draytek DV120 after having an issue with stable connectivity – http://www.draytek.com.au/downloads.php?type=Vigor120. The manufacturer makes available 10 varieties of the same version of firmware with no guidance as to how we should be choosing firmware for Draytek ADSL Routers.

After contacting various suppliers of Draytek worldwide and discussions with Telco’s in New Zealand I’ve found that two main chipset DSLAMs exist at the moment. Broadcomm chipset based DSLAMs are used in older installations and the Ikanos chipset isused in the dual personality A/VDSL DSLAMs within Chorus cabinets.

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One of my colleagues was setting up around 400 student accounts for the new year today. He had an Excel spreadsheet with Firstname and Lastname in seperate cells A and B and needed to add two more columns with the students login name (cell C) and email address (cell D).

At first he thought this would have to be a manual process until I showed him how to join multiple cells in Microsoft Excel using the CONCATENATE function. The login name had to take the format firstname.lastname and the email address had to be in the format firstname.lastname@schoolname.school.nz.
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I’m going to be cabling our new house soon with Cat6 for phones and data, speaker cabling (more on this later) and I’d like to run something at the same time to future proof us if we decide to purchase a projector in the future. I’ve got to make the decision between running an HDMI cable, of around 10m, into the ceiling, or instead run some cabling for YCbCr Digital Component video (as opposed to analog YPbPr/RGB). This post goes through my thought process when choosing HDMI vs YCbCr Digital Component video
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