After a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to get wireless networking at home. Unfortunately, my first attempts to test the connectivity to the rest of the world coincided with the power outages at Telehouse, a “bullet-proof” ISP that too many people rely on, including ADSL services, the BBC website, Nominet, some DNS servers….
I have a few tips of my own to add to the enormous body of help on this matter. Some of most useful (and linked-to) pages can be found below, but if the standard sources don’t help then it’s probably worth bearing the following in mind:
- Unless everything works perfectly, don’t bother with Windows’ own Wireless Zero Configuration utility. This is the default handler for wireless connections, and it frequently gets confused with hardware from certain manufacturers (my system is Linksys, with embedded wifi of unknown origin in my wife’s HP laptop that WZC picked up on easily). You can turn this off by pressing Windows-R, and then running services.msc. Scroll down for the relevant service, turn it off, and disable it by default by right-clicking and selecting “Properties”.
- ipconfig, run from a MS-DOS command line, provides a summary of current ethernet settings. Obvious if you’re from a Linux background; less so if you’re used to trawling through window after window of control-panel applications.
- If you have an existing router/modem, and you’re plugging in a wireless point as an extra router, consider each giving DHCP leases on a different subnet: that is to say, if you connect your computer to your router, expect an IP address on 10.0.0.*; if you connect to the wireless point, you should become part of the 192.168.1.* network. In the long term this will make your network confusing, but in the short term it’s a quick diagnostic of whether or not the machine has accepted a connection from one or other gateway.
- Start with the network utterly insecure, unless you expect someone to warwalk you in that short window of time. Solve one problem at once.
- Depending on your prior setup—Kate’s laptop was originally set up by the ex-sysadmin of an ex-business for which she’s an ex-employee—you might run into trouble if you disable other network components. Specifically, if your wireless card forms part of a “network bridge”, the bridge can often subsume the settings of both its endpoints, and hence disabling it disables all your networking capability. Annoyingly, this can sometimes only happen after a reboot. Even worse, it might only be discovered during your spouse’s lunch hour, meaning he has to spend it driving home and back to fix it.
Links:
Exit gracefully: trust no-one, not even the BBC. Tie up your camel.
