I have spent most of the evenings of this week battling with a home wireless network. One of the disadvantages with the plug and play philosophy of modern technology is that when you need to do something slightly different, the manual (or lack of manual) does not give sufficient information for one to implement the modification.
I live in a largish house with solid walls and a “solid” ceiling between the two levels, i.e. not timber floor boards on joists. This makes instaling a wired ethernet rather expensive and/or disruptive. It also means that the Wi-Fi does not really extend to all the rooms in the house because of all the matter that separates the rooms. I am too mean to buy power-line internet, so I bought a second hand router to configure as a wireless repeater and also provide a bridge for my son’s X-box. Of course, it comes without a manual and the on-line manual is written by someone whose English style resembles a cross between Newspeak and a failed Turing test. The posts, wikis and fora on the web give helpfully conflicting advice. I am driven to taking a crash course in networking, IP addresses, nomenclature and memorising a string of acronyms as my best efforts result in IP address conflicts, the network hanging or crashing followed by abuse from younger members of the family. Eventually, almost driven do distraction, I discover what I should possibly have checked earlier, a mistyped MAC address in a crucial list.
I think this illustrates a clear failing on my part! I was convinced that the reason I could not get the damn repeater to work was because of my rather limited knowledge of networking. Thus I was sure I was making some unfathomable yet fundamental error in what I was doing rather than stupidly miss-typing the crucial data.
Oh, this sounds so familiar, even down to the age of the timbers! Well done for getting there in the end. We did notice a big difference when we installed a wireless network a year or so ago, compared with when we installed our first one about 5 years previously – when it really did seem to be totally alien and required total guesswork – the BT guys who provided the router were really unsure of any of it so it was all down to a wing and whatever the scientists’ equivalent of a prayer is.
However, it is certainly the case here that one of our daughters now knows the (fiendishly complicated) password for the protected network off by heart so is regularly in request by her aged and hence forgetful parents, each time someone gets a new computer or something goes skewy with the network – as, of course, we have long since forgotten where we wrote the key down.
The blessings of modern technology (and old timbers).
One of my oldest friends is a computer network engineer. His advice is that if your computers aren’t laptops or otherwise mobile, hard-wiring is always better than wireless. You might have to drill a few holes, though…
Its drilling holes, chipping plaster, prising off skirting boards, nailing cats under floor boards (yes I have done that twice to particularly inquisitive/stupid moggies) and general hassle. Mind you, ethernet cabling seems to have been pretty futureproof so far, but I know that once I wire the house, there will be a paradigm shift in the cabling standards.