Helping Mom with her internet access
Yesterday I spent a ridiculously long time working on upgrading the network at my parents’ house. Something like 6.5 hours - insane! Let’s look at a rough catalogue of events (all times are end-times, except the first) :
- Leave NYC - depart @ 12:45pm
- Arrive at Microcenter, buy wireless router, head back to Merrick - 2pm
- Hook up wireless router, unhook existing router + AP, rewire wired network, configure router - 2:30pm
- Realize reception sucks - 2:32pm
- Futz around with different settings, turning on / off Interface Robustness, try different channels, compare reception with my laptop. Use KisMac to see what else could be causing interference, observe wireless router refuses to stick to one channel - 4:15pm
- Drive back to Microcenter, return wireless router, buy 2 Powerline Ethernet adapters and a Netgear VPN firewall (for my GeekISP monitoring station), return to Merrick - 5pm
- Install Powerline bridges, Netgear FW - 5:15pm
- Scratch head while hoping the powerline adapters magically start working - 6pm
After dinner, the powerline adapters found each other, and had link lights. But no data would come across. I installed the drivers on a PC on the network, rebooted, tried to start the app, and I was told that I dont have any compatible hardware. Fine! After uninstalling the drivers, it all mysteriously started working…
And then it took about 60 seconds to setup the VPN links. At least that worked fine!
Eventually I got on a 9pm train back to NYC (back in the apartment at 10:30pm). I was pleased that my Verizon data card worked perfectly the entire way, without any interruption. That includes right up until the train arrived in Penn Station (i.e. data service in the tunnel was perfect). I was able to handle a couple of customer service requests in the time.
My hope is that this change to my parents’ network will end at at least reduce the frequency of the “the router crashed” phone calls. Of course, if the powerline devices stop working, there’s just about nothing to do, so that’s a whole different problem…