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Finally, after over 6 years of sterling service (I remember upgrading it to support 802.11b :)) by odd BenQ wireless access point started deciding to turn off all wireless security. Not that it made a lot of difference to be fair, it only supported the basic WEP with short keys so was crackable in about 3 nanoseconds on a modern machine. Anyway, given the linksys router was of similar vintage I decided a combined wireless router combo was an obvious upgrade. Given Ben has a spare g card to get rid off and my macs are both 802.11g capable it seemed like a nice upgrade.

given the old router was a linksys BEFSR41 and had been *brilliant* I figured that a new version of that with a wireless access point built in would do nicely. Given the older linux based versions of the WRT54G are about as common as rocking horse shit around here I figured the new version (that doesn’t run linux) would do me fine. I mean, I can’t be arsed hacking firmwares etc I just want a router that routes, an AP that provides access and a DHCP server that offers DHCP.

This last point appears to be the downfall of the WRT54G and WRT54GS (I actually had the later). It all worked fine apart from DHCP. Statics IPs worked nicely - DHCP bugger all. A quick tcpdump seemed to suggest that while the machines were sending our DHCP requests the router was only bothering to reply after a *long* delay (like 90 seconds) by which time the machine had given up waiting. A bit shit really. Seems I’m not the only one as well :-(.

So, after much swearing I head back to PCWorld today to return it as faulty. I queue for *ages* while the bloke on the return desk does his best to ignore me. Eventually I go into the little box they call their workshop and apologise for interupting them but wonder if they could possibly serve me. Evil glare and I have a “techinical consultant”. I start of gentle with something like “I bought this the other day and it doesn’t work” fully expecting a fight and he responds with “you want a refund?” while putting the suspect router on a pile which I notice has 3 more!

I explain that I actually want another router and give him the bit of paper with the magic intermahweb code that gets me 20 quid off. He looks at it in disgust and wanders off. It seems that the online ordering that works so well at Ashford is slightly different in Canterbury. In canterbury it appears to mean “if we have one you can have it cheap if we can find it” - not quite the advertised service of putting it aside and reserving it for you.

He gives up and claims they don’t actually have any. I go over to the shelf and find one. *sigh*.

Anyway, after a rather drawn out process of getting the security tag removed (which ended up with the manager doing it for me and claiming his staff were “lazy scrotes” which was interesting) I get stopped by the security guy wanting to see my reciept.

I show him my refund reciept (not intentionally, I didn’t realise untill afterwards) and he spent a while carefully checking that my reciept for £-41 for a linksys router was acceptable proof of purchase for the netgear router that he was studying. Quality check! (in fact, it’s just crossed my mind that no one actually checked what was in the box I returned either…could have been bricks for all they knew/cared).

Still, back home and the netgear WGR614 appears to work wonderfully. All machines managed to DHCP first time (which shouldn’t surprise me - it’s not rocket science). Definately recommended. It even matches the look of my nice new iMac (2.16GHz core duo2, 2GB ram, 20″ screen….tis lurvely :-))
Still, this all reminds me why I avoid anything to do with networks at work. I’ll stick to messaging and calendar servers. They *never* break. Oh, hang on…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 8:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.