Tuesday, December 11, 2007

My Technical Nemesis…the wireless router

I set up my first wireless router this summer, and I nearly lost my religion.

I would spend a completely frustrating hour on the phone with some guy in India (I asked him where he was during one of the 15 times I was forced to reboot my computer) as I would try to get my Linksys router’s settings to gel with my SpeedStream modem, only to find out that the problem was with my DSL provider.

Then I would then spend another equally frustrating amount of time on the phone with SWBell trying to undo all the different IP Address and Default Gateway Address code changes that the Linksys guy had made me make.

After that, I would have to head over to my school district’s computer support services department to have their guys tweak my firewall settings, and who knows what else, just to bypass all the goofy security measures they had installed.

Finally, I would end up calling the Linksys guy in India back, reporting all the SWBell and district changes I had made, just so he could say something like, “Now, click the DSL Override button.”

However, after about a month of the hi-tech musical chairs I finally got my desktop’s internet connection back up and running, as well as my wireless laptop’s.

And my Internet life was good, until…

We had a power surge about two weeks ago and suddenly neither my desktop, or my laptop could connect to the Internet.

Don’t ask me how, but somehow I managed to get the desktop’s connection back up and running. However, my laptop would show the connection, and say it was connected, but I couldn’t access anything.

After three calls to India, making someone in India extremely mad at me, and two more calls to SWBell, I am finally back up and running…Internet connection wise that is.

It’s all very humbling for a guy who takes great pride in his “Do-it-Yourself” abilities.

I guess some things are best left to the professionals…





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