The first lesson of troubleshooting computers is the title of this blog entry. When in doubt, hit the on/off switch. I forgot that earlier today, and had some troubles. But I get ahead of myself.
It's about 10:30 pm. We I checked out the UPS this morning, it said my router was on the way - "Out For Delivery". Ah, the joy! The rapture! The annoyance of being sure that the packages would arrive while I was at the doctor's office. Well, it didn't come while I was out, and so after I returned I cleaned much of the house while waiting. Finally I heard someone on the porch, and happily walked out to pick up my new hardware... and found a box for hubby-Eric there instead. It was the post office, not UPS. ARGH!
So I brought in Eric's box, and, grumbling, cleaned dishes, put laundry away, then read some of the stories in Legends. And waited. And waited. And finally, about 5:15, I heard a truck outside and heard someone on the porch. And there it was, my router and card!
The first thing I did was set up the router to talk with my laptop, so that I knew that both the router and the card worked. I spent a couple of hours going over the security settings, and figured out how I wanted to place the router to get the best coverage in the house (the instructions say that it has a range of about 500 feet, so it doesn't matter too much). I waited until hubby-Eric got home before starting to move wires around, so he at least had a chance to get on-line before I messed with it.
Getting my desktop (Box) to communicate with the router was easy as pie. But then, it's connected with a standard ethernet cable. The iMac (Xoanon) was much more difficult. I didn't know how to set up the TCP/IP settings, and so I got a crash course in configuring Macs. Eventually I figured out that I hadn't set the DNS settings. Once those were set... no problem! So Box and Xoanon were both chatty with the router and with the world outside, last thing to set up would be my laptop. And since I had checked it earlier, I knew for a fact it would work.
Of course, it didn't.
I tried everything I could think of to get the thing to reconnect. I even turned off virtually all the security... nothing. The router couldn't see the laptop (Abe), and the laptop couldn't connect to the router (although it kept claiming it could see it). I finally hooked it up with the ethernet cable to the router to troubleshoot, and found that it still didn't connect. At which point the troubleshooting lessons I learned so long ago came back to me. I turned off the laptop. I turned it back on. Everything worked like a charm.
So my last step it putting the WEP back on. I've got most of the security set up now, and everything is working very nicely. I guess the next step with my laptop is to visit the pug house of horrors and see what sort of hoops I have to jump through to add it to the network there. In the meantime, I can 'net from just about anywhere in the house. And I like it. A lot.
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