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August 10, 2002

I love wireless!

I'm sitting here browsing the net in my living room unconnected to anything physical at all, at which point tradition dictates you have to blog about how great wireless is.

Huge thanks to Simon Thornton for talking me out of buying an Airport and doing it the cheap way. Also, lots of thanks to the following two site: Robin Walker's Cable Modem Troubleshooting Tips and Nig's guide to Setting up a home network with NTL. Neither of them dealt in detail with my peculiarities - i.e. having a Mac, but were unbelievably helpful in getting me this far.

Here's a summary of the key wisdom:


  1. NTL registers the ethernet/MAC address of the computer you use to first set up the line with its DHCP servers.

  2. You can reboot the STB with a different ethernet device attached and it'll take you to the login screen

  3. An airport has no way of handling this

  4. You have to get a router that can clone MAC addresses and pretend to the cable box that it's the original computer

  5. All wireless access points are pretty much equal

  6. Get a seperate router and wireless access point - you're almost certain to want them to be in different places. In my case the cellar and the back bedroom respectively

  7. You can normally borrow a PC to do the config if you have to

  8. DON'T CONNECT ANYTHING UP WITH THE POWER STILL ON!

So the eventual kit was a Linksys BEFSR81 8-port DSL router and a Belkin Wireless Network Access Point.

Posted by Tom Dolan at August 10, 2002 01:48 PM

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Comments

Thanks for this Tom. Saul and I are going to get wirelessed up as soon as we get back to the UK. You'll have to give me more details about the Joy of a Mac. Are you using OS X .2?
Cjp

Posted by: Carmen at August 11, 2002 03:44 AM

I've postponed the 'Jaguar' experience for now and am still on 10.1. Given my current employment situation I've got to try and get as many software updates sneaked through before anyone notices...

Posted by: Tom at August 11, 2002 11:39 AM

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