At home I have signed up for BT Total Boardband, which touch wood has been working well so far. With Option 3, you get the BT Home Hub and Phone which is a wireless router with a few ports at the back so you can plug in your phone for VoIP, two ethernet ports (using one for my powerline adapter) however tonight, I went into the Network on my laptop and noticed a item called Thomson. Immediately I thought we had been hacked!! It wasn’t showing up in the admin section so started to get a little bit concerned. In one of the pages it had this unknown device listed as being connected to ethport3 (yet only two ethernet ports) with an IP of 192.168.1.253. A little bit of digging and I found that this is for the usb port on the hub.
So, I plugged in a small USB pen (which I got free from Google), went back into Network and there was a shared folder of bt_7g, this was my usb pen. My home hub is now a NAS box with full read/write ability. Very cool and free! On bad point is that my 4Gb pen I’m not using doesn’t fit, need a little cable so it can break out the back.
hi mate – thank-you for this info. I have been scratching my head for the last week trying to figure out what the hell this was.
I initally thought it was the xbox 360 wireless adapter as I only noticed this issue after I purchased it and had to make some changes to the home hub settings. After reading your post I put in a key and hey presto! Instant NAS! how cool is that but why doesn’t BT tell you what the hell they are doing with there updates.
bad news : I just bought a worldbook for £189 to share documents when a 4gb key can do the same job 🙂
cheers again – less hair to pull out tonight 🙂
You can use a usb external hard drive on the home hub. The home hub will act as an NAS server. Check out http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/homehubfaq.html
Hey thanks I wondered what Thompson was… i thought it was a hacker so I raised all of my security!!! Thanks for letting me relax!
How did you find out what 192.xxx.x.253 was???
while im at it, i put in a 1gb stick and it works! i think i might try using it as a time capsule for my mac, except i’ve saved loads of cash!!! thanks!