Saturday, January 31, 2004

I decided it was too cold to go skiing tonight.... plus Im going on Wednesday anyway. I spent the day working on the 802.11b project. I was browsing Linksys's site earlier today and they showed a scenario of expanding a wireless network.... almost exactly what I was doing but I was using a WAP11 as a client and in their scenario they were using a WET11. I figured I'd give it a shot. Now, since I wont shop at Best Buy anymore, I made the trip to Monroeville to CompUSA to get this WET11. Came all the way back and started setting it up. What a nightmare. I think the WET11 would have worked well in most scenarios but in mine it did not. Since the signal was so weak coming from my house, it kept grabbing the signal from the other WAP11 which is meant to send the signal to my grandmother's house. This was essentially creating an endless loop and making a HUGE disaster. Eventually I unplugged that WAP11, connected my laptop directly to the WET11 and started surfing the internet.... boy was it bad.... I think dial up is faster. Did a continual ping on my router..... it was dropping packets left and right. Took the WET11 down, put the WAP11 back up and then the second network (consisting of the WAP11 to send the signal to my grandmother's house and the WAP11 repeating the signal IN my grandmother's house) I changed to another channel. Then I made ANOTHER trip to Monroeville to return the WET11, took that money and went to Radio Shack. Apparently Radio Shack makes antennas specifically for Linksys products. These are 5.5db gain as opposed to the factory 2.2db (or something like that). I bought a set for the client WAP11 in my aunts hour and for the WAP11 in my house. So far, so good. I did, for the heck of it, try to take the TX/RX rate back up to 11mbs. Yea, that did NOT work..... so I'm still stuck at 2..... but for what we all do with it, that is fine.

So basically... at the close of this day... alot of crap went wrong today.... but I fixed it all..... except Tiff :( ... and of course, thats what means the most to me. But I cant get a hold of her.

But.... I still love her.... alot!

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