Spanner No. 9 and a rusty NUT

Contributed by Haresh Karamchandani

This morning we noticed that our Internet was not working. We tried trouble-shooting by resetting the wireless CISCO router, the switch, the POE (Power-over-Ethernet) Injector to no avail.

The only other solution was to climb up on the terrace and check the Transeo Flat Panel Antenna. The Antenna was not powering up. We took the long extension cord with the POE injector up to the terrace and brought down the Flat Panel to test it. This is where the trouble began!

The Flat panel has 4 nuts that held the cover to the RJ 45 Jack inside. The nuts had become very rusty due to the elements. We managed to get 2 loose but the other 2 would not come off. Strangely we were using a No.10 spanner to loosen the nuts but 1 nut was a No.9. We did not have a No.9. The office staff went looking for a No. 9 and brought one back. Apparently there are “American Standard” spanners and “Japanese Standard or British Standard” spanners!! All of them are No.9’s but all of them are different sizes!! The spanner that our staff brought would not work as it did not match the standard.

Eventually we found a proper No. 9 spanner and that fitted the nut. But the nut and the bolt turned together! This NUT was giving us a big problem. Eventually we had no choice but to use a hacksaw and cut off the bolt! Getting 1 nut to open took us a whole frustrating hour!

Now that we were able to access the RJ45 jack we could use a jumper cable and test the Antenna by connecting it to the POE injector.

The Antenna powered on!

Then we had to check the CAT6e cable running from the Antenna to our indoor router. We had a LAN tester and ran a test. Yes!! 2 parts of the cable were not transmitting!

The staff is running a new CAT6e 3M cable. Hopefully our internet will be up and running once we replace the cable.