One of the challenges of our trips to Faerie is that I get to put on my Technical Wizard hat — a bit faded, crumpled, and moth-eaten — and show off how much I don’t still remember about working on PCs.
I have a laundry list of things to do at the Ks this year, but the first was reestablishing the wireless network here. I had a setup all working the past few years with the DSL modem from AT&T (SBC) Yahoo and a Netgear wireless router, but sometime midyear their DSL stopped working, and the AT&T technies had gotten them back working by undoing everything and getting their PC hooked directly to the modem.
Which would never do as I moved in with my PC, and Margie’s too, with rumblings about their getting another additional machine here, to boot (so to speak).
So first step Friday was trying to get the wireless hookup back working. And … no joy. For whatever reason, the Netgear router wouldn’t dial the DSL successfully. Now, I’m not a DSL guru by any means, so I wasn’t sure if there was just something I needed to tweak, if there was an actual failure in the DSL modem, if AT&T had changed something to not allow it, or if the particular older router was somehow no longer compatible. I did a bit of poking at the AT&T/Yahoo pages, but didn’t come back with anything clever besides the fact that they flog their own home networking kit and didn’t have any support info beyond that.
In fact, the last thing I wanted to do was call AT&T Tech Support for help. After dealing with explaining why I wasn’t Jim, having all the identity validation stuff at hand, and knowing to a moral certainty that they would simply offer to sell me an AT&T solution for eleventy zillion dollars a month,
*sigh*
So on our shopping peregrinations, yesterday, we swung by Best Buy and I resolved to pick up a newer router for the Ks, which would cover at least a couple of the above cases. I mean, I’ve had a couple of Netgear routers go out on me, so I thought I’d replace it with a Linksys one like at home and see if that worked. When in doubt, swap out the hardware …
“Hey, look, here’s an AT&T one,” Margie noted. And, by cracky, Best Buy was selling the same AT&T integrated DSL modem/router gateways that were discussed up on their pages. Which would (for a few dollars extra, natch) give me a full solution that AT&T tech support would accept. Huzzah!
So we picked that up, and this morning …
… with some help on the tech support line trying to puzzle out Jim & Ginger’s password …
… we’re up and running. Easy-peasy (relatively speaking), and now blogging this wirelessly from the card table (and my notebook).
One issue dealt with … dozens more to go …