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	Monday, April 29, 2002

OKAY people (and you know who you are!). You'd better get your entries in for the Westchester Lagoon Ice Classic! Here are some hints as to current ice conditions: Slushy on the top all over the Lagoon. Big open lead at the East end where the creek comes into the Lagoon. From this morning's Daily News: Bad news for people who bought April guesses in the Nenana Ice Classic: The Tanana River is showing no sign of budging.  Breakup on the Tanana River is expected to occur later than usual this year. With an unseasonably cold April, the river ice remains solid at 44 inches thick. 9:39:20 PM    comment []

Adventures in Technology: Episode #2 - conclusion The Easy Wireless Home Network When we last visited this little project, Peter's wireless setup appeared to be working, although the signal was weak. Well - a weak signal even though the access point was 5 feet away with a clear line of sight should have triggered some major ahooga warning bells. Turns out the Linksys card was one flaky piece of silcon crap. The card kept losing network connection and locking up Peter's PC. After some contemplation, I decided to order another PCI adapter card  - this time Orinoco - enough of this Linksys stuff. My boss, Richard, loaned us an Orinoco PCMIA card. Tonight (after an afternoon of wireless troubleshooting) we decided to attempt the install. Well at first everything went very well - Peter sucessfully installed the card with a minimum of effort. But then the drivers didn't install correctly and it took 20 minutes of hard crashes, restarting Windows in Safe Mode (ugh), and rebooting before we got the driver installed. But after the driver was installed, we had an all-too-brief eureka! moment - the signal indicator was bright green and the signal was excellent. But alas we had no network - sob. The ipconfig utility came up with the default non-network ip address. Depression set in. But, after reviewing the Orinoco manual, I discovered that the TCP -> Orinoco protocol had not been added. Windows 98 is definitely more primative than XP (but it's a heck of a lot more stable). Anyhoo, I added the TCP protocol, rebooted, and - EUREKA!! A strong network connection!!! Happy surfing ensued. Case Closed. Moral: home wireless networking is never easy. 9:26:38 PM    comment []

Adventures in Technology: Episode  #3 part III. Steph attempts to add a Nomadix Gateway to an 802.11b WLAN Ah - the adventure continues. I'm back down in the switchroom with the Nomadix box that now has its very own IP address. I also have a rollover cable - so I'm ready for business. Before I booted up Huey (my laptop), I did a little test. I plugged the Nomadix box into the cable modem and used the rollover cable to plug into the access point and Eureka - a green blinky subscriber light on the Nomadix box. Just for grins, I switched out the rollover cable for a regular cable and the Nomadix did not like that at all - no green blinky subscriber light. So on to actual testing. Oooh - this is very exciting. John Barnhardt says he's been sending the Nomadix box good karma all morning... Sigh...there are green blinky lights on the access point and they blink in unison with the subscriber blinkies on the nomadix box - but I don't have a network connection. sob... Well, let's see if the nomadix box works plugged into to my computer...I just plugged it in. Absolutely no sign of a network connection. Hmmm. Just for grins, I'll try the regular cable...That of course did not work. Time to SOS John... Note to self: I need to learn how to ascertain my IP address...Oooh - John just told me how: open a command prompt and then type inpconfig (that's right - I'd forgotten). So anyhoo, I did ipconfig and I do have an ip address (from the nomadix box). This indicates that the connection is working fine between my computer and the Nomadix box. John now suggests a serial connection between my computer and the box - so I'm off to find a serial cable. Serial cable obtained. So, now John and I are doing a hyperterminal session and talking directly to the Nomadix box via the serial port on my computer. The Nomadix has its own little primative configuration menu. After much fiddling it is very clear that the Nomadix box is not talking to the world. All our pings come back with no response... John is now off talking to Chris... Chris wasn't in, but John is now on-hold with Nomadix tech support. Time for a nature break... Much has happened - we did a whole bunch of stuff that basically resulted in the following: The Nomadix box is probably working just fine. We eliminated it from the mix by plugging directly into the cable modem and assigning the ip address that was to be assigned to the Nomadix box. And guess what - nothing worked. So it appears as if our network ip address and config was not set up properly...grrrr... John will follow up with tech support tomorrow morning. sigh... Why is this never ever easy?!   2:53:01 PM    comment []

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