Wireless networking pisses me off.
Actually, ALL networking pisses me off.
Allow me to elaborate.
The Nintendo DS has the ability to go on line via Wi-Fi. It uses a 1-2 Mbps 802.11b connection. Apparently my router decided it would be cool to play stupid last night, and require a restart to work with the DS. It was also showing 11 Mbps on the laptop, even though both are 802.11g, and the laptop usually connects at 54.
So, I power cycle. The DS finds it (finally) and accepts the WEP key. I played for a while and went to bed.
The fun begins today. I try to play, and it alternates between “I can’t see the access point” and “I can’t find a DHCP server”. Apparently my linux DHCP server no longer likes the DS. The logs show no errors, and shows that a lease was granted to the DS, but it DOESN’T ZARKING WORK.
I even went so far as to get a wired NIC for the Tivo, thinking that my problem was there, and that’s when I found out (the hard way) that the DS can’t even SEE the access point in G only mode.
Updated firmware, returned the NIC (sorry, guys), Tivo’s back on wireless.
The DS works, but I’ve had to hard-assign it an address. It shouldn’t be this difficult. I suspect that if I had a more “normal” setup (DHCP runs on my server, not on the access point, and the access point is not connected to the DSL, it goes through another router first) that I would not have had any of these problems.
Such is life.