Thursday, February 9, 2006
Usual breakfast at M's. Updated a listserv for a student. The wireless router I bought from buy.com less than 48 hours ago arrived this morning - wow! Regalia reg form work. Lunch at Golden Rice Bowl: cashew chicken lunch special. My fortune: Adventure can be real happiness. 37, 25, 41, 45, 19, 9. Computer support coordinator meeting. Made live the graduation reg form after a name change. I looked up the meaning of haptic after reading Cult of Mac today in Wired News. Reinstalled Spy Sweeper for Lucia. Installed Google Safe Browsing for Lucia and Polly. Winamp and Quicktime updates for Chris. Dinner at home with Patrick: pig chops on a bed of grilled yellow bell pepper, baby bok choy with mushrooms, bread and butter. Spent a couple of hours setting up a Linksys WRT54GC wireless router. Forty-seven minutes of that was spent on the phone with Linksys technical support, which appears to have been outsourced to India. Linksys support could not help me—their technicians didn't seem to know what they were doing, although level 2 support was better than level 1. I had gotten everything working and connected except the web server was not visible from the outside. The solution was to change the web server's network configuration from a manually assigned DHCP IP address to a dynamically assigned one. I had originally chosen a manually assigned address because since it was a web server I didn't want it to accidentally lose its address, but in the Linksys interface I was able to plug in that computer's MAC address to manually assign it (or map it to) a DHCP IP address that I specified. I think that should be safe enough. So finally we have wireless working at home. I submitted an update to point frankfarm.org to the new IP address—it should take effect within about an hour. I think the Linksys technician I spoke with was really relieved that I solved the problem on my own because he didn't seem to be getting anywhere and didn't come up with any ideas or even very good questions. I think their jobs must be pretty hard for people like me with a more complicated home network than the typical person, so I didn't get mad or anything like that. So it turns out that Linksys wins over U.S. Robotics, and that 24-hour toll-free support was really worth it, even if they didn't actually help me other than provide emotional support. If this Linksys router didn't work out, I was ready to just give up on it all.