Network Setup Tricks

I picked up a refurbished D-Link DWL-G710 wireless range extender because our wireless signal gets weak on the far side of the house from the router. (The middle of our house is a 12-inch thick solid wall that's not kind to wireless signals.) Setting it up was easy (OK, I do work in Networking). I read the Amazon review by Ken in MO, and winged it. I plugged the provided Ethernet cable into my laptop, and into the DWL-G710. I set my IP address to 192.168.0.29 with netmask 255.255.255.0 and gateway (doesn't actually matter) 192.168.0.30. I went to 192.168.0.30 in my web browser, and answered the Wizard questions. Then I clicked on Network and set a static IP address that actually worked, and set my laptop back to regular DHCP. I made sure I could ping the new address, I unplugged it, and I moved it to its final location. Seems to work with very little effort! Yay!

Last month, I set up a Belkin Wireless 802.11g Router for my hubby's office. There were two tricks (or pitfalls!) that I learned. The first is that I can't set up a new Belkin router downstream of our existing Belkin router at home. This seems like a stupid design addition, but if the new router were not connected to the cable modem, if the new router were getting an RFC 1918 private IP address, it wouldn't save any of my configuration changes!!! Why should it care that it's getting a private IP address from DHCP? It could reach the Internet! And why would you ever have a mode where no changes can be saved? I had about given up setting up that router in advance when I learned that it needed to have a routable (not private) IP address. The second is that while WPA2 works for Mac OS X (my platform), I had to back down to regular WPA for Windows XP (hubby's platform).

Last year, I bought a GigaFast EE171-PR USB print server because it was pretty cheap and also supported SNMP. Since I use SNMP all the time at work, I was very curious about that aspect! (It came in handy one day when my cable modem went out, and I was writing an SNMP script for work. I switched to the print server as my test SNMP target, and kept right on working.) If I were starting over from scratch, since mine actually came with the IP interface enabled, I would see if I could manage it through the web interface. I would set my IP address to 192.168.0.10 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and a gateway (doesn't exist so it doesn't matter) of 192.168.0.1. I would see if 192.168.0.4 or 192.168.0.5 answered a ping. Whichever one answered (I forget which one I used on my laptop, and which one was on the print server!), I would go there in my web browser and see if I could do the setup. As it was, since I had read the IP interface was disabled by default, I used Windows (ugh!) and a manual install of PS_Admin. In PS_Admin, I could discover and configure the print server; I skipped the configuration options that weren't IP. Initially I had it set to pure DHCP, but that meant the printer might get a new IP address after a power failure, so I finally set it to a static address for my home network.