Random tat

[andygates]

Finally, my new broadband came onstream. Yay to 8Mb wireless! Yay to blogging on the bog! T'is wizardry, you know.

If only I could get the 770 to talk nicely to it. Ah well, off to forum land. Meanwhile I shall guzzle content like a hog at a trough. On which note, the pincers of doom say a body fat of just under seventeen percent. I'm almost missing the easy control of space that being a gert huge fat bastard gives, but only almost.

Christ, but Youtube is good down a fat pipe.

Comments

You're so skinny!

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

Incidentalyl enjoy the blogging but please don't podcast frmo the smallest room, no matter how good the acoustics are.

Re: You're so skinny!

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Bogcast... some podcasts sound like that don't they? I got hold of a tri one which was almost two hours of unedited nattering in home, car, and at stops on the bike. Structure, people, structure!

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Yay to 8Mb wireless!

Most spiffy. I, myself, am becoming Sore Vexed trying to get our wireless situation working at home. Just got a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router, and after a couple of false starts (had to reboot the cable modem before DHCP requests from the router were honored, which seems odd, but okay) got it running.

Now, though, the loaner laptop from work (which we wouldst fain use in the living room to do idle surfing and suchlike without having to scurry off to the bedroom, where the workstation lives) says it can't see any wireless networks in range. And, as it's a Windows box and I don't know nuthin' 'bout no Windows, I really have no clue what to do with it. Replace it with Debian, maybe, which is the general solution I use when Windows problems arise.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I take it the obvious Control Panel > Network Connections > New Connection wizardly guff doesn't work then?

[skean.livejournal.com]

Also, if the loaner laptop has an external 3Com card in it, check for patches. I have the same router, and my 3Com card had the same issue of not seeing it. Took me a while to track it down, but 3Com has a patch on their site that solves it.

The Linksys set up wizard also walks you through some security if I remember rightly. I can't remember if one of the tick boxes is "Turn off broadcast SSID", but maybe it was?

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

It's an internal Intel wireless card, but looking for patches might not be a bad idea, as what afflicts one card could possibly afflict another.

I've also seen suggestions that turning off the Windows firewall can help, which seems odd to me, but 'tis worth a try.

And, to answer your question, the router is broadcasting the SSID.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Windows Firewall came in as part of the XP SP2 nonsense, which was basically a massive un-breaking of Windowd to work in a more standardsy way regarding security. But a lot of things relied on Windows to be flapping open like a whore's drawers, and so they broke comprehensively once SP2 turned up. It's not a bad idea to see if there are recent updates.

[skean.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I keep windows firewall turned off as long as I've got a decent Virus scanner running and a firewall on the router. It seems to involve too much configuration to get it working right.

MAC address filtering not resticting it? Can't see how that would prevent the laptop even seeing the router mind you.

Good luck with getting it working.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Update, in the unlikely case you're curious: while poking around on the laptop, I found an Intel PRO network card setup utility, and as the wireless card was a PRO, I fired it up. It told me the channel the card works on and specified that it only knows WEP, and not WPA (which the Winders Wheeze-ard cheerfully let me set up). I set the router's channel accordingly, and the "Scan for networks" button in the utility found it immediately. I set up the WEP key, and bingo, surfing the intarwebs, no problem.

Stupid Windows wireless network setup wizard.