Its amazing how many blogs you get a chance to read and comment on when you can’t sleep! Rob has written some software that can be uploaded to a Linksys WRT54G wireless access point that forces people to go to a html page of your choosing when they first use your access point. This is similar to the way commercial wifi providers work. You would then normally sign up for a limited period of access, but in this case you would probably acknowledge the accesspoint owners “welcome” and info page before continuing to surf. A neat hack – shame it won’t work on my netgear box although I guess it won’t be long before something like this will get hacked to work on other machines.

http://nocat.net/download/NoCatSplash/

The power supply arrived this morning about 3 minutes before I was due to go to work so I’ve not had a chance to use it yet – hopefully it all works tonight!

After ringing Netgear after having no response on the email, and spending 9 minutes on hold I spoke to a techie who said that the problem was likely to do with having a duff power supply. If i installed the usb manager software and got some specific error messages – “Device not recognised” or “DSU not recognised” (or something like that) then the problem was definately a faulty psu. Seeing as though that was the error message I got when I installed the usb software I persuaded him to send me a replacement PSU and I don’t need to send anything back so its a free replacement. The PSU comes from the netherlands so I have to wait a couple of days for it 🙁 Still I’ll be glad to be wireless again! The daft thing is that the phone techies don’t have access to the emails that are sent to the tech support address!

After taking the wireless Access Point into the office and not getting it picked up on the lan at all with the snmp manager or my network scanner I sent an email off to Netgears Technical Support department yesterday requesting a RMA number. As yet I’ve not heard anything back (apart from an auto acknowledgement with a ticket number and a list of frequently asked questions, all of which have nothing to do with my problem). I took the unit back home to triple check on the original lan and it still didn’t work there either – in fact it doesn’t even light up the led on the hub to say there is an active connection (and yes I’ve tried a different network cable).

For about a week now the wireless lan has crawled to a halt. I uploaded a file to my website and it downloads on the lan in 15 seconds. If I download over the wireless lan it’s *expected* to take 9 minutes 24 seconds. This is sitting within 1 metre of the Access Point, with full signal strength and 11Mbps on the speed. Any ideas on what could cause this and how to troubleshoot it? As its basically useless at the moment 🙁 Pings are 6 ms slower on the wireless lan)

Been having some weird problems with the wireless in the past couple of days – software says I have a good or excellent signal running at 11mb yet performance to web pages is abysmal yet the wired computer is fine so I know its not the ADSL connection. I pinged my two websites from the xp laptop this morning and got an average connection time of 103 and 92ms for helsby.net and absoblogginlutely.net
However when I pinged from the wired connection it was about 10ms greater than the wireless connection! Like I said in the topic – weird!