My wife would like to add a separate 'phone line' to our home. I have heard of a set up where up have one phone line/number and when someone calls in there is device with a message to press one number for one phone and a different number for a second phone. To me this sounds simple and likely cost effective for what we want to accomplish. Has anyone heard of this type of setup and what equipment is involved?
Thank you in advance.

Not entirely sure, but what you are talking about sounds like a pbx system. These use hardware/software for internal routing answering the phone, forwarding, storing messages and so forth. It generally isn’t inexpensive to implement. There might be something along these lines for systems with between 2-4 lines. If so, stores such as Staples and other office product suppliers would have them.

Most or all residential phone lines are wired to the interface box with 4 wires and almost all residential wiring has a spare set of wires. Cat 3 cable, which is used for most phone line, uses 4 wires. It takes 2 wires to make a phone circuit, so you probably already have one big component needed to install a 2nd line.

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

Some phone companies will give you the option to have a "distinctive ring" capability. This will allow you to have a different phone number over the same phone line. When someone calls on the other number, your phone will ring differently than normal. That way you know someone is calling on the other phone number. Works pretty cool.

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Frank
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Hey Tracy.

First, thanks for some advice concerning massive data you gave previously. You'd find the impact of your comments affirming.

What do you think of wireless networks for home? we're not allowed to use wireless to access our LAN at work, no matter what kind of password protection we claim. Why is that? Should this affect my home network?

Bot

Wireless networks are not my field of expertise. I fight putting them in offices. Many don’t care about the risks. Anything one does on a wireless network can be monitored. Many or all wireless networks can be haakked. Using the tools provided and integrated into most wireless routers will reduce the likelihood of being haakked but not eliminate it. If you care about things as trivial as your shop username and password, let alone banking, credit card, personal info, browsing habit related info, you don’t want to use a wireless network.

Proponents of wireless will say that due to the latest encryption methods that it would take a haakker weeks or months to tap into your network. This may or may not be true. Folks what wants the more powerful haakking tools can find them.

Regarding data storage, TB drives are now in the realm of consumer devices. If you had some real money to throw at data storage you could do this...

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

Short of a PBX system it might be easier to get a dual line phone system which is inexpensive (and what I use) and or just get two handsets with or without answering machines.

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Are you talking about call waiting??? I worked for the phone company a few years and call waiting doesn't give you 2 phone lines, just a "beep" when you are on the line with someone else to notify you there is another incomong call. you can switch to that call and then switch back to the other line. You can get a custom ring tn and that means you would have 2 seperate phone numbers and 2 seperate distinctive rings depending on what number the caller dialed. ie. if you had 555-1212 and 555-1213 and someone called them both they would have seperate ring patterns in your house. However, you can only have one connection in your home at one time. The only option to get 2 functional lines at the same time is to add an additional line.

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Whoa. That's just like us, if you allow for the 7 orders of magnitude differences in budgets.

We're up to serving 7 TB and will double that by year's end. Last fall (when I asked you about this) we projected 4 TB would be needed by year's end. Our LAN is completely replaced with fiber bundles. I don't know anything about that stuff but it is noticeably faster and much less prone to crashing. Even so, we often use 1/2 TB drives to transfer data. It's faster to walk a large format hard drive to another office than it is to send it over the network.

Are the offices you work in spread out over several buildings? My experience with fiber optic is limited to one installation. There it was used to inter-connect different buildings. Code demands a non conductive media be used to stop differences in grounding between buildings.

Do you know the bandwidth of your network? The fiber backbone connections used by phone companies are up to about 95 gb, where a high speed lan is 1 gb and most office LANs are 100 mb. For the sake of comparison, a modern high speed T1 line used mostly for internet connections is about 1.5 mb, and a dial up line is about 44kb to 56 kb. Because you’re walking the drive between, what I guess are close locations, it implies that the LAN isn’t gb or is maybe saturated and that’s why it’s quicker to walk it than transfer it…(?)

Back to storage and the reason for needing ever more bandwidth in the first place. Despite the compact size of the TB boxes now a days, it can take a long time to get data on and off the drive. USB 2.0 high-speed, which is the current state of the art, pegs at 480 mb. I vaguely recall seeing a reference to a USB 3 spec, which will be called wireless USB or WUSB. This next spec, estimated to hit the streets around ’10 will offer about a gb of throughput. At this rate, by 2010 there will likely be 100 TB drives that take about the same space as a 1 TB drive does now. Incredible! Yet it will still be intolerable if folks are storing and sorting through 100 TB of info, or more with a mere gb of throughput…..

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

I wish I knew the particulars. All I have to do is ask, I guess. I did know something last year when I was part of the planning but I haven't paid attention since. Leave it to Mr Wizard.

I believe we have 5 or 7 T1's coming in and the ability to go to a completely independent network with 2 T1's or to CATV in emergency operations. We have 4 buildings networked on the LAN. I think the LAN is in the multiple GB realm so if useage is low then file transfer over the lan is very quick. So quick that It's only an issue if I'm operating on huge files. For files of a gigabyte or so the difference between Firewire and LAN is inconsequential, but if the files are in the 10's of gigabytes then the difference is apparent. If a significant proportion of the 200 workstations are online and making demands on the system and somebody begins a massive file transfer it can bog things a bit.

We also added a satellite data link that is about as fast as CATV and expensive! That's one we have a flexible subscription with. If we have a need for bandwidth they flip a switch and drain our account. We use that system to data link with a remote system for emergency response.

I remember someone once having a setup when you called the number there was an anouncement that directed you to press 0 for their home business and 1 for their home. They physically had two different telephones (one for business and one for home). I believe that there was some sort of device that received and routed the calls and it used only one incoming phone line with no special features from the phone company.

For what it's worth we're not allowed wireless networks at work either. Security folks claim that they are too easily broken and information is easily obtainable. In the past a few departments have secretly put them in so that they could use laptops in various buildings. They were sniffed out with wi-fi detectors and shut down.

As for home, we run a wi-fi network that hooks into 3 desktops and 2 laptops. Our network uses both WEP and WPA. WEP stands for wired equivalent protocol and is supposed to equal the security that you would have using ethernet cables to connect your computers. WPA is newer and supposedly more secure, I don't remember what it stands for. Basically the security consists of encrypted communication between the computer and the wireless router. You still have the same security issues at the router (such as open ports and the like) that you would have without the wi-fi. I'm pretty happy with our wi-fi network since I can go anywhere in the house or yards with the laptop and still be connected to the net.

Our neighbors on either side and up the street also have wireless networks that they don't secure. I can get into them and surf the net any time I like. I'm sure if I wanted to I could snoop into the info that they send back and forth. I've told them that the networks are open but it's not a big concern for them. Works out great for me because I hop onto thier network when our connection goes down as it periodically does (yay, Verizon). I've told them all what I do and none of them have issues with it. It's all personal preference evidently...

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

That’s interesting. Out of curiosity, could you find out if your lan is segmented into a number of different subnets? Generally it ought to take a lot more than just one big file transfer to bog a large lan. Here’s why: At a minimum, all computers perform a network broadcast process. That’s a computer’s way of voicing itself to the network and saying “I’m here.” The broadcast is received by every computer in a subnet. There is a point at which so many computers are broadcasting that all by itself, the network would become bogged due to all these this voices saying, “I’m here” endlessly. Now if they are actually working and sending traffic over the wire, the volume of traffic goes up and up and up until you can’t push more data and you get a bog. To keep the chatter to a minimum, and also to in effect extend the bandwidth available, the IT guys set up limited number of computers in a subnet. Generally, only other computers in the same subnet communicate within the subnet. Further only data which is intended for another subnet is routed to that subnet. In addition, the IT folk, if they have good routers and know their stuff, they have great control over who and what can and does pass through a router in any event. So by setting up separate subnets you reduce the minimal network use level and also make it possible for more data to be transmitted concurrently over the lan.

The downside of this approach is that you need a router for each subnet. In addition it takes a little more administration to set up and if there are router related problems they can be nightmarish to identify and solve.

Back to the wireless lans. The ideal way to add wireless computers to your network (or for a VPN for that matter) is a combination of putting them on their own subnet and using external security tools. When a wireless network is on its own subnet, even though a haakker may slice through the wireless security related components, once in the network they will have problems browsing outside of the subnet in which they entered. In fact you can pretty much turn off the browsing ability at the wireless router and obligate wireless users to use known paths. This can be done “to decrease bandwidth requirements” (wink wink) but mostly it means that haakkers who connect and try to listen to the network will only be able to record a limited range of activity. Most folk get ruffled when they have to remember how to get at their email server or network drives, and tend to not tolerate this approach very well.

Another solution that has gained in popularity is to use a physical encryption device. This is a “key” that connects to a USB port. Without the key even if you have all the components to get on the lan, including a valid mac address, user name, password and entry point you won’t succeed. The coolest of these I’ve seen have a clock on the key and will change their coding scheme by the minute. Once a key is found to be lost or missing, or even out of sync (a form of tamper proofing) it will be automatically disabled on the server side. Folks I know in bigger networks lean towards the encryption key. While it is a pricy solution, it is one which provides the best security and can usually be sold to the IT folk as reliable.


I love fail over systems. Only 2 of my customers have used them and both decided it was better to go "a day" without connectivity than to pay for the backup redundant systems. The real magic in them is that you can “let” certain people use the fail over system routinely, so that they don’t have to share bandwidth. The end result is the selected few feel good and everyone else has a little less traffic to deal with. It’s a win win thing. Except for the cost.

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

Are you sure that wasn't just an answering machine? Answering machines with 4 "in-boxes" are readily available. (the idea is that you'd have on for you, one for your wife, one for each child, etc.)

If you want to be able to conduct 2 different conversations simultaniously, you need a second line (or a sophisicated business system). As was indicated earlier, all the phone jacks in your home have 4 wires leading to them. You are only using 2 of them. So you have the capacity for a second line in your home already. Simply call the phone company, and they will connect the other 2 wires to a new number, and you'll be in business.

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Jeff Pierce

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