Jhbgirl- hi there; I see my name has been taken in vain here (*g* @ Robone), so I'm honour bound to defend myself! First off- your signal quality. I get the feeling you're in the general Roodepoort area but you're sitting with a signal strength barely into double figures .. shall we say "less than encouraging"? To highlight how dire that is I put up a grid antenna with 8degree beamwidth in Honeydew sitting 5.65km away from Helderkruin. On the day I installed it (17.09.04), the ProAsm v5.0 dialer showed I had sig=36%, ber=71%, snl=18%, rscp= -69dBm, iscp=-87dBm. While we're doing data- this is down 7m of LMR400. Oh- and I have all sorts of screenshots to back this all up.
The last time I checked it on 27.09.04 after the 3m mast had been shaken around a bit by some pretty nasty winds that howl past that site's install (a major motivation beheind going for the grid in the first place) the figures had settled down to sig=35%, ber=71%, snl=15%, rscp= -70dBm, iscp=-85dBm. The moral of the story- a antenna properly put up tends to damn well stay there (and this is the important bit)- give consistent results! *g* But seriously, short of Sentech doing something silly with the tower an antenna is aimed at AND nothing untoward (so called "acts of God" nonsense) you have every right to expect that it'd work.
You refer to a guarantee- I ask: what would you want guaranteed? The actual bits and pieces would all be brand new and it's really the dish and the feed that are relevant to manufacturing warranty claims anyway- you can't really take back a cable that's been cut to length that wasn't also terminated AND by the vendor in the first place. Would you want the workmanship guaranteed?
Sure- subject to the usual kind of disclaimers (including but not limited to):
- tampering with it, eg some numbskull manages to pull off a connector and puts it back only to find that signal has gone down the drain, would void a claim.
- the cable being struck by blunt (possibly squashes the inside bits together- not good) or sharp (possibly cuts or connects the core to the shield- definitely not good) objects would void a claim.
- obviously a lightning strike or something similar (say an errant high power line or something equally silly) would very much void a claim!
- the house/wall falling down...
- etc., you get the picture- pretty much that which would pass the "reasonable man" test under common law.
Obviously if the actual tower goes dark (a la Fourways Golfpark- AND the damn idjits didn't retune the Exchange tower to compensate- at least as far as I've seen), it's hardly a fault to do with workmanship; that would hardly warrant a claim against workmanship. I hope this clarifies THIS part of the topic somewhat for you. Naturally the ONLY way I would be able to take this from a bunch of hot air to something meaningful is to get up on your roof/similar and physically test it out- which is entirely your call.
As to your router: that li'l beastie used to be sold by Esquire in Samrand- I still have a pricelist from 19.07.04 that has a price for the part. Only problem is that manufacturer seems to have gone bust! But thanks to the magic of the Wayback Machine, an archive of that product page can be found at http://tinyurl.com/5sdpl (shortened- the full URL is long and cumbersome). Also- if you don't have the Book of Words(tm), or the .pdf manual there's a fighting chance something by way of tech support/info could be sought from Esquire themselves. I have NO idea whether that particular model router can keep logs but the D-Link DI-604 that I use for my router-based installations very much DOES log connects/disconnects *AND* can optionally log to a syslog server- exactly the suggestion nonroker had right up there at the top. If you like I happen to have one that's available to to a good home.. note: this means absolutely ANYONE that'll pay me for it! *efg*
The router PC option: Smoothwall is GREAT! And dead easy to setup too- hell, I'm a near-total Linux n00b and I set one up no problem; of course you'd actually want to have (or scrounge) a spare PC from somewhere or other. Maybe look to the big-hearted guys in this forum for some help in that regard! But then you already have your wonderfully *quiet* router appliance that'll never be subject to HDD/PSU/etc. failure, so this may not be an optimal choice for you.
And so (at long last- sorry for the Gunman-esque post, there's a lot to cover dammit!) to your original query: a logging app. As the term goes- "Google is your friend"! Only, for that to mean anything to you (and I don't get the idea that this is your forté), you'd have to know where to start looking in the first place- pretty much a chicken-and-egg situation for the non-cognoscenti. Now, the reason we're looking for an ethernet logging app is because you're using an ADSL router- which can only mean that your PC is plugged into it on the LAN side and the modem via the ethernet cable on the WAN side. That said: again, short of testing out the config you describe, I for one have NO idea whether this approach will even work.
Anyhow, I Googled for "+free +windows ethernet traffic monitor sniffer" and got some pretty interesting results, almost enough for me to get all geeked out and get hopelessly lost in perusing results from the FIRST result page (note: the 2nd down for the nitpickers out there) at http://www.handyarchive.com/free/ethernet/ .. and that's just the START! Actually, I'm amazed none of these hotshots here *duck* even mentioned Ethereal- for all that your using it would be tantamount to swatting a fly with a Buick! I also stumbled across PRTG at http://www.paessler.com/products/prtg/?link=home1 .. this, too, may be a candiate for you; only a test will tell.
So, your query having scratched an itch, I may even look into this- I suspect it may give me info worth knowing. Besides- it's an excuse to geek myself into the middle of next week, get all sorts of data and generally absorb myself in STUFF (and practice WAB .. Work Avoidance Behaviour) *efg*).
Heh- hope (at least some of) this helps!
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