{"id":14,"date":"2005-09-28T00:22:50","date_gmt":"2005-09-28T05:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/?p=14"},"modified":"2005-09-28T00:35:50","modified_gmt":"2005-09-28T05:35:50","slug":"the-route-to-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/the-route-to-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"The Route To Hell…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year ago, I finally got a new
\nlaptop<\/a> to replace my aging
\nFujitsu LifeBook 420D<\/a>. By aging I mean decrepid. By decrepid, I mean
\nPentium 120 with no USB, a broken CD-ROM and a misaligned floppy drive. The
\nkind of laptop that makes me cringe when I show up at a customer’s site and
\nthey ask, “Can you fix it?”<\/p>\n

The question that needs to be asked is, “Is it worth fixing?” In this case, it
\ndidn’t take me long to decide, “Hell no!” I got a good deal on the new laptop,
\nalthough it wasn’t a high end system, I think I got a good value for my money.
\nSo far, my only complaints were the need to upgrade the RAM (a cheap fix) and the
\nleft button on the touchpad. It has a mind of its own. Mostly, when I click it,
\nit ignores me. When it decides to respond, it makes up for lost time and clicks
\ntwice. I’m under warranty, but I’ve already been told, “It might be a driver
\nproblem and you’ll need to wipe the hard disk and install the recovery CD
\nbefore we can accept the warranty.” Yeah, I’ll get right on that. For now, I
\nhave a little mouse I plug in when I need it. Soon, I’ll be upgrading the hard
\ndisk. When I do, I’ll clone it, do the factory refresh and deal with the
\nwarranty issue. Until then, I won’t be recommending the manufacturer or the
\nretailer<\/a> to my customers.<\/p>\n

The one thing I do love about my laptop is the freedom that comes with the
\nincluded 802.11g Wifi adapter. Along with my fancy, new D-Link<\/a> DI-624 broadband
\nrouter<\/a>, I can freely roam the house and even sit on the patio and enjoy the
\nsunset view<\/a> over the lake while I merrily answer email and poke around online.
\nUsually.<\/p>\n

When I first put in the router, I started having problems with interference. My
\ncordless phone is also 2.4 GHz and everytime the phone rang, my router would
\nreset. My desktop system would tell me that the ethernet signal disappeared and
\nI’d watch the interface cycle. Any data transfers I had going, remote shells,
\nand IRC would all bomb out. I lived with this for a few weeks until I got to
\ntalking to one of my buddies online. He suggested I force the wireless radio to
\nuse a different channel and avoid the interference. Lo and behold, it worked!
\nMy router ceased its dance of death with my telephone and I thought all was
\nwell.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I won the battle, but the war was far from over. Although the
\nregular disconnects were over, I was still experiencing random, intermittent
\ndisconnects. These disconnects would occur anywhere from two to twenty times
\nper day. I also had problems with large data transfers. Anytime I fired up
\nbittorrent<\/a> or any other P2P applications, my connection would start dropping
\nevery five to ten minutes and stay gone for around five minutes. The only way
\nto hasten the recovery would be to release and renew my IP address from the
\ncommand line. Believe it or not, I lived with this for almost a year. The straw
\nthat broke the proverbial camel’s back was a sudden and immediate need to run a
\nVPN<\/a> connection to one of my clients. After establishing the tunnel, the
\nconnection was so slow, it was unusable. In fact, I couldn’t even get
\nEnterprise Manager<\/a> to connect to the remote SQL Server<\/a> database.<\/p>\n

I ended up taking the router completely out of play and plugging my PC directly into
\nmy cable modem. This worked great for my desktop, but it left my wireless
\nlaptop feeling lonely and neglected. Of course, all the other annoying problems
\nwent away as soon as I bypassed the router.<\/p>\n

Last I checked, D-Link offered a three year warranty on their products. Since I
\nneeded a new router for use in my office, I decided I would purchase a new
\nrouter, take the old to the office and get it replaced under warranty. Having a
\ndefinite plan of action, I proceeded to purchase a new router. As it happened,
\nOffice Depot<\/a> had the same model router on sale for about $40 (after mail-in
\nrebates). With my $15 bonus coupon from the rewards program, I would be out of
\nthere spending less than $30 net on the router.<\/p>\n

I installed the new router only to discover that it suffered the same problem
\nas my previous, allegedly defective router. I guess I had a premonition this
\nwould happen, because I hadn’t yet carved up the box for the UPC symbol or sent
\nin my rebate forms. I resolved to return the router and purchase a completely
\ndifferent brand. Since it was the weekend and gas was still close to $3\/gal, I
\nsuffered until Monday. Connecting and disconnecting cables from the
\ncable modem and my PC was getting a bit old, so I tried logging into the
\nrouter’s web interface and turning off the wireless radio. Without the wireless
\nfunction, the router worked nearly perfectly. I say nearly because I was still
\ngetting a couple of disconnects daily.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I exchanged the D-Link for a Linksys<\/a> WRT54G router<\/a>. I chose this one
\nbecause I anticipated great fun playing with the open source firmware. Not that
\nI intended to write my own Linux build<\/a> for the box, but I knew a few people<\/a> had
\nenhanced the stock build considerably and thought it would be fun to play.
\nInstalling the router took only a few moments. I flashed the router with the
\nlatest official firmware build and my connection has been flawless. I even
\ndownloaded a 350 MB torrent last night and never once did my connection to IRC
\ncycle.<\/p>\n

Postscript: My new router appears to be TOO new to use third party firmware.
\nThe router uses revision 4 hardware (my serial number starts with CDFA) and the
\nlikes of Sveasoft’s<\/a> Alchemy<\/a> refused to load. They promise support in version 1.1. I can’t wait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year ago, I finally got a new laptop to replace my aging Fujitsu LifeBook 420D. By aging I mean decrepid. By decrepid, I mean Pentium 120 with no USB, a broken CD-ROM and a misaligned floppy drive. The kind of laptop that makes me cringe when I show up at a customer’s site and … Continue reading The Route To Hell…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-nonsense"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1yjzF-e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inanimatereason.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}