Upgrading the home network

I just finished replacing my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with a Linksys-by-Cisco WRT-160N wireless router.

Q: why a new router? Wasn’t the old one working? Yes. But I have a project that will require a WRT-54G — yes, it involves DD-WRT — and Amazon had a good price on refurbished WRT-160N‘s. (Whoa: it’s $4 better than when I bought mine three days ago! Curse this Black-Friday madness!)

I was astonished to see there was an automatic configurator for Macs. Things have sure changed since I bought my iBook in 2003.

After that, configuration went about like I expected. The automatic installer just assumed 192.168.1.* was available, and grabbed it to use as the LAN. Instead, it should have been a nice little DHCP client and asked the DSL modem what network it was on, and learned it was on a 192.168.1.* network. So of course, nothing worked.

But I’ve been through this before, so I didn’t take long to figure out the problem. I deleted the automatic configuration and started over, telling it to use 192.168.2.*. After that, it only took a couple of minutes to set everything up.

An unexpected bonus was figuring out how to delete old WiFi networks on the Windows Vista box. (That feature was there all along, seemingly, but when I’m doing Windows administration, I can’t find my backside.)

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