Disconnected

It's nice to have friends. Friends have a lot of good qualities. They share your good times and bad, help you out in times of need, bring qualities to "the party" that complement your own, give you an alternative perspective on the world in general and today's problem in particular, turn up and trash your wireless network an hour before you have to go out to a bonfire party.

Huh?

Yes, well, you know. Shit happens. When we had the Mexican night a few weeks ago, we'd intended to seek out a Mexican radio station on Shoutcast to play some mood music when it was our leg, but we couldn't get through to the server. Casting around to test out some other connectivity, we found we couldn't reach our other PCs on the home network either, so we assumed the XBox's wireless bridge was at fault. I began to wonder whether we'd configured it when we were using WPA-PSK. I'd had to downgrade the encryption standard to WEP to allow my old laptop to connect, and thought maybe the bridge was failing to connect on account of that.

Anyway the problem became more serious when we wanted to start watching Series 2 of Heroes, so I called in the friend (names have been changed to spare embarrassment) who had initially set the bridge up to check it out. With hindsight I could just as easily have gone to the manufacturer's website and dl'd the manual myself, but ... you know ... I was feeling lazy.

So yesterday was not only the day of the bonfire party, it was the Day The Wireless Bridge Got Sorted. Only it didn't. With remarkable (I could say whirlwind) speed and staccato throwaway comments like "you shouldn't have it set up like that," and "oh, no, you don't do it that way," our fully functional wireless-network-and-Internet-access was trashed to the point where no computers could see the Internet, none could see each other, my work laptop couldn't see the bridge it was plugged directly into, and the wireless router was refusing to reset.

And all because we had two DHCP servers (one on the Internet facing DSL router and one on the wireless router). They were on different subnets, so they weren't interfering with each other, but it wasn't "right" so we had to have it changed. For some reason I never did quite fathom, we didn't get a vote about whether it was changed or not, but in simple terms the situation can be described as "our way=works fine; friend's way=nothing works at all."

So I methodically put everything back the way it was and got it working again (took me an extra couple of hours to get my work laptop back to the point where it would actually connect to work, which had me worried for a while) and spent a few minutes contemplating the relative merits of asking for "help." The irony was that the bridge had been set up just fine. The problem with Shoutcast was Shoutcast's fault, and the problem with the access to the home network was that I was using the wrong Samba sharepoint. Ho hum.

What was even more annoying...when we sat down to watch Heroes we had the same problem as last year. The wireless signal in the lounge just isn't strong enough to carry a video signal and after a few minutes we start getting lengthy pauses in the playback while the XBox does some buffering. The only recourse is to FTP the files down to the box, which meant we couldn't watch any episodes today.

Still, in the midst of all this, it's important to remember that without said friend, we wouldn't have the Heroes files in the first place, so it's all swings and roundabouts really. We all make mistakes. Live and learn. Forgive and forget. You have to laugh. Etc.