DescentBB

Yesterday I managed to acquire a wireless network card for my laptop. After installing the card and the software, I quickly discovered that I would need someone to configure it for the residence hall network. Since the offices were already closed, I slept on it, and tried again this morning. By this afternoon, the guy had me all set up with WLAN and the newest version of Norton Antivirus. Because the router just happens to be mounted in my closet, I had excellent reception between the PC and the router.

My connection out to the internet, however, was another story altogether.

I checked with the student housing office, where I just now learned that the residence hall servers were down, and wouldn't be back up until tomorrow. I go home for the weekend tomorrow, and I have to baby sit the dog (who will be fresh out of surgery) over the weekend while my family goes out of town, and I won't be back until next Tuesday.

Ha! Your trip through wireless hell is only just beginning. I went to a college that he d deployed a 100$ wireless network to its dorms, and it was dropped connection hell. Almost unuseable most of the time. A server being down has nothing to do with your inability to connect to the wireless, what most likely happened is some switch locked up (yes, there are switches that can lock up just like pcs), or some wire is misconnected somewhere and their people are too lazy to either power cycle the offending device or find the misconnected wire.

Heh, last weekend I was at a guy's house when he was setting up a LAN for a bunch of us who brought our computers over, and the one machine that he had problems on was the desktop PC with a wired connection. Everybody else has laptops with wireless and they connected without a hitch.

Although connecting to a large network like a school can be a pain sometimes, especially if they do things like have mac addresses whitelisted and the like.

No university-provided wireless in my dorm, but from the sounds of it it's for the best. I just use a Linksys wireless router. It's nice to have control over port-forwarding anyways.

The only downside is that the air around here is sucky. I'm using an unused wireless channel (most everyone else is crowding 6, which must suck for them), but I still get ~94% signal quality, even though the router is 4 feet away from me. That's after I doubled the default signal power with an unofficial firmware. At my house, I used to get a solid 100%. I suspect that the wireless channels substantially bleed into each other, not to mention all of the various 2.4Ghz wireless phones and what not that are probably around here also ruining the air (sometimes my signal drops to about 70%). Then again I probably shouldn't complain--70-94% isn't all that bad now that I think about it.

The solution to the 2.4GHz trainwreck phenomenon is to get some A or dualband equipment. unfortunately, thats kinda hard to do now since A's popularity is nearly zippo.

On the other hand, that just means more frequency space for my laptop. 5280MHz for teh win.