Tag Archives: wireless

Recent Inanity – 5/1/2010

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Just installed a new Netgear N router that I got for $30. Now I can play Windows Media Center streams from the Media-PC to the Laptop over wireless without skipping. YAY

Working on Saturday sucks, but it pays the bills. Trying to figure out some odd glitch on a client machine with Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5. Windows installer/LiveUpdate tries to install updates for the thing, and fails. The application itself fails to run. Right clicking in an Explorer window and selecting ANY function crashes the shell after a few seconds. WEIRD!

I want to set up the Inanis Sandbox, so you can see what I’m working on and I can play with WordPress junk without killing Inanis.net. I have a sandbox running, but there’s no content. I’ll have to work on that.

So, I proved the engineer wrong.

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The director of engineering where I work pseudo-bet me that I could not get a Wireless Router with Switch to act solely as an access point. He claimed that the router part would always try to route data regardless, and surfing would fail because nothing was plugged into the WAN port.

Oh, how wrong he is.

On both US Robotics and Linksys devices, and perhaps others, you can use them as an access point if you:

  1. Configure it to use a different subnet than that on which you are. (i.e. programming it for 10.0.0.x when your network is 192.168.1.x.)
  2. Shut off it’s DHCP function.
  3. Plug the router into your LAN on the switch side, not the WAN port.

Because of this, the router thinks all traffic flowing on it is local, and just bridges this traffic between the internal switch and the wireless radio. Instant access point.

With that said, I posted this entry using my laptop running over the very US Robotics router that the engineer said I wouldn’t be able to configure in such a way. I am also using a Linksys wireless router at home in this same manner. I win.