I too hate networking

Post #365,210 by rcareaga 10/14/12 7:20:03 PM Reply	I too hate networking (This was originally contemplated as an inquiry, but concerned lest I appear too foolish—I am myself disposed to be a tad censorious when approached for advice by people who have not explored at least a few potential avenues toward a solution—I undertook a few cable swaps and component substitutions, and stumbled upon a serviceable remedy.) As many of you are aware, I'm something of a duffer techwise, lacking even elementary fluency in many of the areas of expertise shared by the founders and onlie true begetters of this group. Probably in no realm of electronic inquiry is my cluelessness starker than when I contemplate the jerry-rigged apparatus by which I send, receive and distribute electrons from the intertubes. Years ago I had to enlist a Russian teenager (who has since had to flee the country for unrelated but compelling reasons) to set up the configuration I had until earlier this month, and have since added to this but cautiously. At the spousette's behest I have had AT&T upgrade our internet service from "laughable" to "mediocre." As part of this process they replaced the bare-bones DSL "modem" with a black box that adds a router, both wired and wireless, to the earlier unit's functions. Unfortunately in the course of the installation my "Airport Extreme" base station had to be disconnected, which killed the wireless audio link to the stereo in the next room. Nichto problemo, thought I. I'll daisy-chain the old router. Nope. But a humble old ethernet hub, by means of which I have continued to print to my ancient but sturdy HP Laserjet 6MP half a decade after Steve Jobs murdered AppleTalk, has saved the day. I had in reserve (God knows from where) an eight-port gigabit switch, which would have been the next box to swap into the chain, but if it ain't broke, sez I (channeling the late American political philosopher Bert Lance), don't fix it without a compelling reason. So woo and yay, and woo again. But it remains a little nerve-wracking to muck about in these matters with about a quarter-clue as to what I'm doing. cordially,
Post #365,213 by Another Scott 10/14/12 10:19:18 PM Reply	Most of just flail around until it sorta works. Congrats!
Post #365,222 by folkert 10/15/12 10:57:57 AM Reply	Well... that is just plain wrong. If people would realize that networking is just an arbitrary set of settings (with a specific set of rules enforced by the gear) made up by the person doing the work... Its just a matter of using those "probably forgotten" parameters when changing. Oh well... most people don't care enough to keep the network settings handy at the gear or anywhere so flail when it comes to making changes. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #365,223 by Another Scott 10/15/12 11:12:08 AM Reply	Of course. I don't like it, but that's the way it is for me. Just about every Winders laptop comes with some vendor-supplied WiFi networking gizmo to "make it easier". They're often multi-hundred-megabyte monstrosities. And Winders comes with its own. Quite often, in my experience, they can conflict and it can be very difficult to fix when something goes wrong (e.g. if you try to "clean" your system by getting rid of cruft that you think you don't need). "Well then, there's your problem! You're still using Winders!!!1" I know, I know. :-) But I find the same thing with versions of Linux I've tried. In Ubuntu, quite often changes to the WiFi settings don't seem to "stick" for some reason. E.g., now I seem to be having issues with DNS lookups timing out on one of my laptops. I've tried in the past to fix such things and have ended up with WiFi networking not working at all, so I haven't been brave enough to try fixing it again. Yes, I know that Ubuntu's WiFi settings are just a front-end to the real utilities and a simple script will take care of that. I haven't had time to learn that (and put it somewhere that I can find it again in the future). If it works, it's not worth messing with to make it correct in most circumstances. YMMV, and does. :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #365,236 by scoenye 10/15/12 6:14:35 PM Reply	Sounds familiar... Last week, I helped someone out with a similar setup. In their case, it was old DSL router plus Netgear wireless router. Our local telco monopolist replaced their DSL router with a "new and improved" model. Turns out new & improved was dumber than old & inferior and did not support the protocol needed to detect the downstream Netgear router. AT&T may have pulled a similar stunt.

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