Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects" -- Roger Zelazny

"... My head is filled with things to say."

Much to write, including latest adventure of Perrine, but I ran out of steam and wound up needing a nap. Much email to write and some hardware-wrangling to do as well. Haven't decided yet whether to first tackle the things that'll make me feel like I'm being responsible, or try to relieve the distracting pressure-of-ideas by writing LJ entries as soon as I'm up again. I'll decide when I get there.

(Awake again. Getting things done in more or less random order as they catch my attention. Screwed up (forgot to change tapes) and only taped half of tonight's episode of CSI. Made myself pasta and garlic bread for dinner while watching ER. I guess this is "television shows whose titles are initials" night. (Does that mean I'd like JAG and NCIS if I watched them? I liked MASH and SWAT[*] when I was a kid...))

Last week I mentioned problems I was having with an SMC Barricade wireless router. I got around to tinkering more today. If anyone's curious how that's going, or has additional clues to provide beyond the suggestions already made, here 'tis...

Since the 'ping' command at the command prompt in Windows NT doesn't report statistics, the 50% packet loss I'd reported was based on casually eyeballing the screen as it scrolled by. When I counted, it was more like 40%.

Turning off the wireless function of the router (and noting that the "WLAN" LED did go dark when I did so), packet loss went to 37.5% -- still unacceptable. I've tried all three ports on the router. I've not yet tried swapping the cable, but I just freed up another cable so I can get around to that without having to make one as soon as I feel like disconnecting the NT box again or moving the router nearer to some machine that I'm not in the middle of doing other things on.

I have not yet checked throughput between two machines on the "local" side of the router, 'cause the only other wired machine within convenient reach is the aforementioned Sun 3/60 which ain't gonna boot until I get around to either putting a boot image on my file server and setting up bootp, or seeing whether any of the SCSI disks I've got are large enough to hold an OS and small enough to fit inside the case. So there's another test not yet done. (Hmm. It looks like I really should move the router downstairs for testing.)

The router wants to talk to a broadband WAN -- cable, DSL, etc. I've already got a Linux box doing 56K dialup. I want this router for port expansion (add more machines to a room that only has one cable going downstairs) and the wireless, not to replace my gateway machine (though if I find a way to afford DSL ... hmm ...), so I've got the "WAN" side just plugged into a cable that goes to a hub in the server room and I told it my LAN is the WAN it's looking for. The connection from an NT box on the "inside" of the router to a Linux box on the "outside" (but both within my house) is what I tested. Plugging the downstairs-cable directly into the NT machine produces a connection without any packet loss.

I have not yet upgraded the firmware -- I got as far as finding the downloads section of the SMC web site before more urgent things demanded my attention, so that's on my to-do list for sometime in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I've tried -- and failed -- to get the PDA to talk to the wireless LAN at anniemal and syntonic_comma's house, and likewise for getting it to talk to an ad-hoc network from the Airport on one of their Macs. And my brother doesn't know the login and password for the admin screen of his wireless router, so we couldn't tell it to allow the PDA on to test there, either. So far I've seen that it can connect to my SMC router, and can even load part of a web page, but it can't maintain a connection long enough to get all of my most-recent-entries page, and sometimes can't establish a connection at all -- my guess is that's because of the packet-loss problem at the router.

Neither the most urgent nor the most important thing on my plate right now, but something I hope to solve anyhow.

[*] Okay, that should have been M*A*S*H and (IIRC) S.W.A.T., but the theme worked better if I left out the punctuation. FWIW, I don't remember enough of S.W.A.T. to be able to say whether I'd still like it if I saw it now.