Icing

30 Dec 2005

On the cake that wasn’t. Well, it looked like itcould be a cake, but was actually an oversized muffin. Like the second 10Mbit hub I now own.

Anyway, this oversized-muffin isn’t even resolving the connectivity problems I was having. I have determined with some degree of certainty that the cause of rollercoaster-like Internet access lies exclusively with that D-Link piece of crap/excuse of a router. Which I have only once mentioned in the past here. Suffice to say it was bought chiefly because of my lack of time to get a proxy/PC-based router setup at the beginning of this year, and I didn’t like the idea at the time (‘usurped’ was the word I used, I believe), and like it even less now.

The first Battle of the Firmware has been fought, but, as with the Battle of the Cowshed (I just read Orwell’s Animal Farm), it ultimately just resulted in a change in title of those who were in power: the nature remains the same. Okay, enough trying to apply Communist theory to routers. Basically the firmware I settled on works fine until you actually start trying to use the wireless part of the router. Don’t buy D-Link.

Proposed solutions to the day’s problems:

• Take the 12pt back with some grunting and moaning.
• Use the shiny new Samba server as a caching proxy/Adblock proxy and router
• Revert D-Link piece of crap to the firmware in which wireless works fine, but Bigpond login client does not. Proceed to use as a run-of-the-mill 802.11a/b/g/whatever-the-heck-it-does Access Point.
• Check out the power supply in my Ubuntu desktop (it doesn’t have a cool name… it’s just “josh” on the network, and it wouldn’t do to say “check out the power supply in josh”. The new server, incidentally, is called Whisper.), because it’s possible plugging in a webcam was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Unlikely, but possible. If not, it’s going to be the motherboard. In which case I’ll probably cry for a while, then realise that the motherboard didn’t have Firewire, its onboard audio broke very early on, and that I could do with some more USB ports anyway. No, processor speed doesn’t come into the equation at all… though I’ll readily admit I’d be happy to have something faster. Oh, yeah… all this means I need to spend more money on a new motherboard and processor :(

Well, unless it’s just the power supply. In which case I can get away without buying any new toys. Thank goodness.

And whenever I finally get around to moving to Team Mac — though I’m not too keen on the Mini anymore, having got one at work and realising:

1. They have an external power supply that is bloody enormous. Of course, being Apple-made, it’s a damn sexy power supply, but that doesn’t negate the fact it’s roughly the size of a house-brick.
2. It’s impossible to have dual monitors, due to the lack-of-space-for-anything.

– But *when *I finally move to Team Mac, I’m looking forward to putting that system out to pasture in a working state. And never again will it have anything weird and wonderful plugged into it. It can just sit, and contemplate what on earth was going on when that strange bulbous thing with a USB lead was plugged into it.