As I recounted yesterday,I spent this past weekend (which was one of the great weekends weatherwise) indoors doing techie kinds of things. Saturday, I installed our new HDTV and HD cable box.
Sunday, I replaced our malfunctioning Linksys Broadband Router/Wireless Access Point with a newer model. I also swapped our old proprietary Com21 cable modem for a new RCA Docsis 1.1 modem. How much fun can one person have?
Our Linksys gateway/router/wireless access point had been somewhat on the fritz for a few weeks. It couldn't hold a VPN connection for more than 1/2 hour. But more importantly, Pooh's Internet poker was suffering mightily because the wireless network would drop at very inopportune times. More than once, Seth growled "The wireless connection just cost me $100."
So obviously, the pressure was on to do something.
After some research, I decided that really the Linksys Wireless B/4 Port Router was still what we wanted. I did not want to go to 802.11g because of distance issues - the G wireless signal can attenuate and the Partnow Manse is nothing, if not vast. Besides, the price has really dropped on the Wireless B routers. So, it made sense to get a somewhat inexpensive Wireless B router and wait for the performance to improve and the price to drop on the G routers.
So on Sunday morning, we scurried off to Frigid North (yes - they're open on Sundays! True geek heaven!) and picked up the new router.
Then came the tricky decision - do I install the router and the new cable modem all at once or do I do an incremental install? I decided to incrementally install - do the router first and make sure everything still works and then do the cable modem.
I pulled out the old router, plugged the new one in to the old cable modem, plugged in my desktop system to the router and then used my desktop to directly access the router. First thing up was to do a DHCP renew - everything would have been out of wack if I'd been using the IP addresses assigned by the old router. The new router would know nothing about the old IP addresses. After the DHCP renew, I had Internet access. Yipee!
I then downloaded and installed the router's latest firmware update. This is hugely important. Linksys routers out of the box can be flaky - the latest firmware load usually fixes the flakiness. Next step was to test the wireless connections and the remote print server. Everything worked splendidly.
On to part II of our show - swapping out the cable modem. This is a somewhat time consuming process because the new cable modem needs to register on the cable modem network and then be activated. That process took about 45 minutes. At that point, I plugged the cable modem into the router. Renewed the IP addresses yet again and voila - we had Internet access!
The new network has been up for two days and has been absolutely rock solid. Definitely worth the effort!
7:28:16 PM 
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