Wireless and loathing in ... well, New England

[unixronin]

Around this time last year, when living in California, I bought a Linksys WRT54G 802.11g wireless router/AP.  I rapidly discovered that putting the matching 802.11g network card in the ancient Thinkpad 600E I'd salvaged and enabling WPA encryption brought the ThinkPad to its knees -- it was so overloaded it could parely push out two megabits on a good day, if it could maintain connectivity at all.  So the WRT54G went in a box.

I got it out again a week or so ago, at cymrullewes' request, and started trying to set it up.  Having wrestled before with the difficulty of trying to configure it to operate solely as a WAP¹ instead of a router using the OEM firmware, I decided to try OpenWRT on it.

This turned out to be a major mistake.  None of the documented prodecures for flashing the new OpenWRT firmware via tftp worked, so I gave up and used the web interface; fortunately, it worked.  On the first try, OpenWRT didn't boot.  But I tried it again, and made it into the admin interface, whence I happily (but cautiously) began configuring.

This went well up until I tried to reconfigure it from the default IP address, 192.168.1.1, to the 10.24.33.2 address I needed it at in order to put it on my network.  I saved the settings, restarted the router, and it went catatonic.  Completely unresponsive on all Ethernet ports.  The #OpenWRT channel on IRC was very little help; most of them were too busy sneering and making snarky comments to show off the magnitude of their '1337|\|355 to find any time to actually help.  (Of course, it couldn't POSSIBLY be part of the problem that any of the necessary debricking information might be hard to find, or even just easy to overlook, on their wiki if you didn't already know where it was.  Or that the documentation, even the how-tos, appear to be largely written on the assumption that you already know what you're doing with OpenWRT.)

I sighed, wrote off OpenWRT and the WRT54G as a loss, and went on to other things.

Today, after many tries, I finally got the thing unbricked (turns out that while in theory, putting the thing into "failsafe mode" forces it to 192.168.1.1 and enables telnet to it with no password, in practice this only actually seems to happen about once in every three failsafe attempts at best).  On the second try, I succeeded in reflashing the original Linksys firmware (or, actually, the most recently updated version thereof) back onto it.  About three more hard resets after that, it appears I finally had all of OpenWRT's droppings purged out of the NVRAM, and was able to make wireless connections to it once properly configured.

Of course, I still wasn't out of the woods, because the only working wireless client in the house at present is cymrullewes' work laptop, an IBM Thinkpad T40.  Now, Windows does a pretty decent job or managing wireless, though -- being Windows -- it of course has bugs (more on that later), and IBM ships some alternative wireless-management software with their Thinkpads that is really good.

Intel, of course, could use neither of these.  Intel uses a proprietary in-house piece of software called PROSet.  Which, I'm sure, does a very good job of fulfilling its design spec.  Unfortunately, it's quite determinedly passive-aggressive about refusing to talk to the WRT54G.  i couldn't connect at all, even with an open, unsecured connection, except by trning off the Intel software and having Windows XP manage the wireless.  At which point I was able, with minimal effort, to set up a WAP2 TKIP+AES secured connection on the first try.

Great, until I tried to re-enable the Intel software, which cymrullewes absolutely requires for work.  Oh, sure, the software came back up, no problem, no settings lost, etc, etc ... except it couldn't disconnect the wireless connection.  I had to re-disable it again and go back to the XP control panel, where I discovered that every time I manually disconnected from my WLAN, Windows XP -- to all appearances, intentionally -- erased its own memory of the WPA pre-shared key.  (And, me being me, well, that key was neither short nor simple.)  Thus forcing re-entering the damned WPA key ... twice ... on every attempt to connect to the local WLAN.

I swear, some days you can't win for losing.  it's a conspiracy, I tell you!

Anyway, now, at least we have a secured WLAN up, on its own separate subnet, and cymrullewes can connect to it.  It's ten times as much work as it'd need to be if Intel and Microsoft could play nicely together on wireless; but it's possible.  Whether there's actually enough wireless signal to use, upstairs in the bedroom at the other end of the house, remains to be seen.

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[1] Why, you might ask, did I buy a WRT54G router if I only wanted to use it as a WAP?  Because, dear reader, the WAP54G -- a simpler device that does less, but is a better fit if that "less" is what you want to do -- costs over twice as much, because they're mostly bought by businesses rather than end-users.  Go figure.