wireless question

[dep]

begin  David A. Bandel's  quote:

| Understand a wireless access device (a residential gateway, access
| point, whatever) will carry an IP so you can manage it, but it's a
| pure bridge -- just a way to pass from wireless to wired.  DHCP
| will pass right through.

this gives me an opportunity to regale you with a description of my 
last few hours.

first, i believe that any networking documentation should be oriented 
more toward the real world. illustrations should involve things like 
cobwebs, and perhaps a comical picture of a fellow about a tenth of a 
second after he discovers quite by accident that that pipe whose hole 
he is using to get the cable to the floor above carries *HOT!* water. 
it should describe useful tools, the essential of which is the 
straightened coat hanger, and it should provide instructions for 
using electrician's tape to make a nice nose cone in front of the 
connector itself, the design of which is being studied by the makers 
of fishhooks and anchors. (as an aside, there should be a note 
pointing out that the rj-45 connector has won awards for requiring 
the biggest possible hole.) but this is preamble, and in that we 
already had band-aids i was able to string the wire upstairs in under 
90 minutes.

i plugged everything in and the lights came on. i had availed myself 
of what was cheapest, which turned out to be a d-link access point 
(the gateway/firewall/nat/dhcp box is a one-in, one-out d-link, as is 
the eight-port hub, so i thought this was good -- less likelihood of 
trouble with the same brand). the instructions said i was then to go 
to http://192.168.0.50 and run the setup wizard. this was 
problematic, in that the internal page seems unfriendly to any 
browser i have aboard -- the closest that came to working was an old 
netscape, which was able to do everything except "save settings." but 
by now there were other problems.

i now had no internet. none at all. given the state of the union and 
so on, i figured that we were undergoing another internet shitstorm, 
so i phoned a friend to inquire if he had internet service. yup.

i disconnected the access point from the hub. no joy. tried to ping 
the gateway. no joy. checked all the wires to make sure i hadn't 
knocked something loose. wires were fine. ran route -- got no route.

rebooted computer and was told that it had been 192 days since fsck 
had run -- of course. still no internet.

phoned d-link to ask 'em what their access point had done to my 
network. got somebody who didn't seem to know a lot, but who did say 
that i should have disregarded the stuff about http://192.168.0.50. 
in that their "quick installation guide" is devoted entirely to doing 
things at that address, i cannot imagine what possessed me to do it. 
after 45 minutes or so of trying various things that i had already 
done -- ifconfig, route, ping -- he put me on hold. while i was on 
hold, i thought to recycle the power to the gateway thing, to reboot 
it. i did so.

after which i had the internet just fine. i had put the ultra-cheap 
belkin 802.11b pcmcia card in susan's machine; not i went up, opened 
the browser, and up came the web.

guy from d-link came back on; i told him how to solve the problem if 
it comes up again. he said thanks.

anyway, it all works. i haven't tested the range of the thing -- we're 
in the middle of five acres -- but i hope that it will extend 
throughout the house and yard. reason i strung the wire upstairs is 
that my office is in the basement, and it seemed to me that this 
might limit the range somewhat.

and yes, the access point passes through dhcp just fine. though that 
hellish setup utility offers to make it the dhcp server.

so we have moved into the closing years of the 20th century around 
here!
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.