Wireless woes
Feb. 11th, 2007 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eclectic_boyI spent seven hours yesterday banging my head against wireless technology, with nothing to show for it except a banged-up head. My dad is using my old G3 blue-and-white desktop Mac, and I'm trying to get him on the net. For Christmas I got him comcast high-speed cable internet, whose modem is set up in the room where the TV is. When I move the computer into that room and plug it physically into the modem with an ethernet cable, it works fine. But dad doesn't want the computer there, nor does he want cables snaking around the house. So I want to connect him wirelessly. I bought a wireless PCI card for the G3, since there isn't an official Airport card for it, and it seems to be working fine. I bought an airport base station (the original graphite version, which should be plenty for the G3 and that wireless card). All the pieces are there. But I can't make them work.
Both the G3 and my iBook detect and connect to the airport fine. The airport's lights show that it's communicating both (wirelessly) with the computers and (over ethernet) with the cable modem. But there's no actual connection; nothing loads, from either the G3 or my iBook. Tellingly, one light on the cablemodem, an amber one which usually flashes whenever it's sending/receiving, stays utterly solid when connected to the airport. The airport auto-setup on the CD-rom that came with the airport base station won't run on the G3 because it's using a 3rd-party card, so I have to configure it with the Admin Utility, but I think I'm getting the settings right.... I think. But when I had the G3 hooked up directly and used DHCP, it gave me IP and router addresses starting with 71. When I tried the same thing with the airport, it got assigned number starting with 192. I don't think that should be happening, but I don't really know.
On the hope that there's just a problem with the base station, I'm bringing it back to Swarthmore and I'll see if swapping it for the (non-graphite but oh well) base station we use is any more successful. If it doesn't work there either I'll assume it's the culprit, and see about getting my money back. Sigh, this is enough to make me say maybe the grapes were sour anyway and my dad wouldn't use the net if he had it......
Both the G3 and my iBook detect and connect to the airport fine. The airport's lights show that it's communicating both (wirelessly) with the computers and (over ethernet) with the cable modem. But there's no actual connection; nothing loads, from either the G3 or my iBook. Tellingly, one light on the cablemodem, an amber one which usually flashes whenever it's sending/receiving, stays utterly solid when connected to the airport. The airport auto-setup on the CD-rom that came with the airport base station won't run on the G3 because it's using a 3rd-party card, so I have to configure it with the Admin Utility, but I think I'm getting the settings right.... I think. But when I had the G3 hooked up directly and used DHCP, it gave me IP and router addresses starting with 71. When I tried the same thing with the airport, it got assigned number starting with 192. I don't think that should be happening, but I don't really know.
On the hope that there's just a problem with the base station, I'm bringing it back to Swarthmore and I'll see if swapping it for the (non-graphite but oh well) base station we use is any more successful. If it doesn't work there either I'll assume it's the culprit, and see about getting my money back. Sigh, this is enough to make me say maybe the grapes were sour anyway and my dad wouldn't use the net if he had it......
