Regular readers of my blog remember that back in April I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to replace my Belkin router, which had this annoying habit of sometimes showing you the configuration interface on the external port 80 even though it’s supposed to be forwarding the external port 80 to my Linux router’s port 80 and even though it’s configured to not allow external access to the configuration interface. That was a dismal failure because every now and then, at first every couple of days and later several times a day (and definitely more likely to fail if you were doing a large file transfer), it would stop allowing wireless clients to access the outside world, even though wired clients (like my Linux box) were still working fine. Often the only cure was to power cycle, because a soft reboot from the web interface wouldn’t do it.
Because of all that, I continued to use the Belkin at home, in spite of that annoyance. But when they installed cable at the new house, I dug out the Linksys and brought it over, figured that even if it needs to be power cycled once in a while, it would still allow us to use the net when we were over at the house.
So that was my plan for this evening – come home from work, cart out the 7 or 8 bags full of garbage that Vicki and I filled over the weekend, tend to the dog, watch a bit of the Tour de France on TV, then come over to the new house and take care of the birds and keep them company while surfing the net wirelessly down in the bird room. But it didn’t work out that way, because when I got to the new house, I found the Linksys unable to get a DHCP address from the cable modem, even after power cycling both of them. The Linksys actually smells a bit “cooked”, so it’s probably completely ruined now. So now I’m sitting in my office in the new house, on an uncomfortable wicker rocker, connected to the cable modem with a patch cord, and wishing I could be down with the birds on the comfy sofa.
Oh well, it’s cooling down now, soon it will be time to go to bed and not get the sheets too sweaty. (Vicki warned me not to get them sweaty, because they’re new and expensive.)