Saturday, October 24, 2009

Knowing when to throw in the towel a.k.a. networking sucks

I like to think that I know my way around a PC, as well as home networking equipment. I've gone through a couple of cable modems and 3-4 wireless routers over the years. I had a wireless gaming adapter hooked up to my DirecTV DVR, but it crapped out many months ago. One of those plug it in but none of the lights come on moments. I lived without it but finally decided to get another one when I wanted to use on-demand again. This began the loss of my saturday.

I got a Linksys WGA600N on Amazon. I plugged it in, had to connect to it manually because the wizard didn't work and started setting it up. It was pretty straightforward, setting the SSID for the router, adding the MAC address into the router allowed list, etc. However, it wasn't working right away. After about an hour I finally found that the router could see the adapter, but it wouldn't give it an IP address. I had a vista laptop, a windows 7 laptop, an ipod touch, an iPhone, a wireless printer, and 2 XP machines connected with IP addresses served from the router's DHCP. But the gaming adapter showed an IP of 0.0.0.0. I tried calling Linksys, and for the low fee of $9 they offered to take over my laptop remotely and configure the adapter. I laughed and hung up. They had a live chat feature, so I sat on that for about 2 hours with 2 different people that walked me through tons of redundant steps. They finally came down to saying that I should reflash the firmware on my router. So I did that, and still no luck. After about 4-5 hours of total time I gave up, packed it up and printed the return labels for Amazon.

So the lesson learned, is that I should have thrown in the towel much earlier. I ordered a new bridge adapter made by D-link, and hopefully it will connect to my D-link DIR-655 router. This time, it gets 2 hours tops.