New Wireless Router...

the WoW servers were having issues with connections, so I took the time to tackle installing the new wireless router. I had picked up a refurbed version of the Netgear WGT624NAR Wireless G(Super G) in Frys the other day on the cheap. It is supposedly able to do 108Mbps with the correct card. I'm not messin' with that and just have it running in 802.11b/g and the 'Extend-a-Range'(tm) enabled. This is an improvement over my strictly 802.11b setup I was running. No big noticeable effect but i'll see how it does when I fire up Azureus to grab this week's shows, or the next big file transfer. Would like to find some software that gives me an idea of my thru-put.

I was a tad apprehensive about making the change in my network. It worked well enough speedwise, had been in place for a while, nice and stable, had all my port forwarding setup, addresses reserved for various devices, &c., so I was not quick to eff with it. I made note of all the above things like the port forwarding and began the install. Much to my suprise the change was quite painless. The PodBox picked up its new ip immediately after selecting the new network from the wireless menu. I then logged into the router to check things out. Poked around a bit and noticed that it hadn't picked up an address from RoadRunner yet. So I went out to the server room and reset the cable modem, when it came back up the new Netgear was waiting on it, grabbed an ip and all was good. Checked the netgear site and downloaded the latest firmware for the router. Installed that without issue following the instructions from the website. This particular router was a v2 (version 2 I guess), there are seperate firmware updates for non-v2 and v2 routers. The label on the underside of the router will have either nothing or v2 after the WGT624. This brought the router firmware up to version 4.2.4 which is the latest. After the router rebooted things began to grab ips and all was well on the network again. I went thru and re-entered all the port forwarding info and whatnot and things are back as they ever were, and hopefully a bit faster.

This go round I enabled WPA-something encryption for connecting. I hadn't used this on the previous router and it had been wide open to anyone who happened to find it. But as more and more of my computers were connecting wirelessly I felt it a good idea to tighten things up a bit. Enabling the WPA was painless as well, came up with a passcode after clicking the 'Enable WPA' checkbox on one of the router's admin pages and clicked the 'Apply' button. Of course I had to go around and reconnect all the wireless machines and enter the passcode when prompted, but all the Macs allowed the passcode to be added to their keychain and at least the powerbook connected and disconnected from the network a few times without ever again being prompted for a passcode. It freaked me out for a minute when the PC connected right away without a prompt for a password and I began to think something was wanked, but then I remembered that the PC is wired to the router and wouldn't need WPA authentication.

Off to check on WoW again...