An “upgrade” to the network?

Certain other members of the household were concerned that the wireless net wasn’t password protected. So last night, I went downstairs, set it up, came back up and everything worked fine after typing in the passwords. And everyone was happy.

Then this morning when I turned on my PC, it wouldn’t connect to the network. I spent an hour trying to figure out why, couldn’t get it, and finally got so enraged that I went down to Fry’s and bought a new Airport Extreme and Airport Express. Yes, that cause/effect doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s a purchase I’ve been meaning to make for a long time now anyway (upgrading to 802.11g and getting a repeater) and I hoped that upgrading the base station would fix my problem. It did. It also introduced about three other problems, as is often the case.

I’d like to point out that, as expected, my PowerBook went, “Oh, a new network, what’s the password? Thank you.” and connected, and all my Internet was on and working.

The PC went “Oh, a new network, what’s the password? Thank you.” and connected and nothing worked. I got no IP from the DHCP server. I manually assigned an IP and nothing pinged. I got very frustrated and tried many wrong things (as is often the case) and finally someone suggested turning off WEP. So I did so and it worked. But I need the WEP! That was the whole point of this exercise! So finally someone else suggests using 64 bit instead of 128 bit, to which I reply “The Airport only does 128 or 40.”

[Insert dramatic pause while people who know what piece of information I’m missing can laugh at me.]

“64 bit is the same as 40 bit.” Said someone in IRC, just as I read it on a webpage. Had I known this, it would have been one of the earlier things I tried. So switched and, lo and behold, network works with password protection and everything. Then I got the WDS propagation working with the express, after undoing some of the munging I did and everything was happy, I logged in to FFXI to make sure that worked, and started typing this up.

Until I got to this point, at which the network decided to go bonkers, on both my PC and Mac… where I’m getting no outside connection as well as no connection to my linux machine. I swear… what the hell… why me?

This is why I don’t change things when they’re working.

8 Replies to “An “upgrade” to the network?”

  1. This is why I don’t change things when they’re working.

    Yep. My most bork-tastic moments have come when I tried to fix something that wasn’t broken.

    But…you know…after I broke it, it was then “broken” and then I was able to fix it and come up roses. I figure I could achieve a similar end result with less heartache and time expenditure by first smashing the thing I want to upgrade with a hammer so that it is officially “broken” and then the gods would not smite me with the “thou shalt not fix that which is not yet broken” stick.

  2. Maybe that’s why I wimped out on getting a repeater for the house. (if only for the fact that I didn’t know thing one about integrating a repeater into my current wi-fi network infrastructure.)

    Ended up getting a base extension for antennas, and put a pair of 7 dBI “high gain” antennas onto it. It’s attached to the wall in my room, about 3 feet above monitor and router. Signal towards the front of the house is spotty, about 5.5-11 mbps if I’m lucky, but I bet I could get decent signal from directly outside my room, either in the backyard or side yard, when I’m not picking up SSIDs from other neighbor’s wi-fi routers.

    1. Oh, yeah, on fixing what isn’t broken…

      Been there quite a few times, usually when upgrading stuff like ZoneAlarm and PGP. Had a fright-filled hour or two when Daemon Tools made my system halt like me after too much beer and sushi and pizza on a bootup. Figured the hard drive didn’t fail because I didn’t get a “Hard Disk Failure” message, had to remove the Daemon Tools drivers, did way too much work in doing so. System Restore was a bit of overkill there.

      Go figure, Daemon Tools works ok on my laptop. Maybe I should just pony up the $50 or so for the game I’ve arrrred so I won’t have to go through that crap again.

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