Has anyone had any experience with a wireless print server? I have a USB printer (Samsung ML-2010) connected to my desktop, but my desktop's wireless connection is flaky. I also don't relish leaving the desktop on 24/7 when we primarily need printing nights and weekends. A refurbished Netgear WGPS606 has a very attractive feature set at a great price, but doesn't review well. The Linksys WPS54G reviews a little better, but might have issues working with Vista.

Another possibility would be to use the Cube as a print server. It would suck a lot less power than my XP desktop. The bad news is the networking, though there are a lot more wireless USB adapters in the world than there are wireless print servers.

Thoughts?

It has finally dawned on me that all of my networkable devices but one are in the living room. That lone exception is my desk machine in the guest room. I've been contemplating hiring an electrician to fish Ethernet through the walls to connect the cable modem in the guest room to a switch in my living room. I tried bridging this wirelessly, but now I'm thinking I should bridge it through the power line with HomePlug AV. Better yet, I can put the router and cable modem in the living room and use HomePlug just for the upstairs machine. Has anyone used HomePlug yet?

More importantly, do the bridges with only one port pass multiple IPs through? Can I provide my own switch on the far end, or do I need to get a four-port HomePlug device?

I spent more than $100 on WRT54GL routers with the express intent of being able to wirelessly bridge my upstairs network to a new, hypothetical downstairs wireless network. The pending arrival of the new TiVo precipitated this. Tonight, I succeeded in "bricking" one of those routers. A firmware upgrade failed catastrophically, and now I can't connect to it at all. Now I have neither wireless bridging nor a second router to repurpose. Argh, argh, argh.

Oh, and the TiVo arrived a day early, so now I'll just have to console myself with that. And run a fifty-foot ethernet cable to it. *sigh*.

( More than you ever wanted to know about my network connectivity from 1997 to now. )

( So far, the new cable modem doesn't suck! )

My previous laptop ran Windows 98. Not Windows 98 Second Edition, mind you, but the original. This meant networking was a bit of a pain. Every change of hard-coded IP address meant a reboot. Worse, the original had no native support for wireless networking. It's a fluke I ever got my wireless card to work at all. Correspondingly, I had a lot of trouble with my pocket router, which is impossible to configure if you can't easily switch IP addresses. The situation was made immensely more complicated by a complete lack of overlap of subnets. I use 10.0.0.* at home. My Mother uses 192.168.1.*. The pocket router likes 192.168.0.*. I made things worse at some point by telling the pocket router to use DHCP to obtain its local IP! When I'm in Pittsburgh, I want it to be an access point so I can use my Mother's cable modem. I've managed to get this working a few times, but not recently, and never without a half-hour of hair pulling. Tonight, I did a hardware reset, flashed a newer rev of the firmware, and was able to get it working in about ten minutes. The new laptop made all the difference . . . no endless rebooting! Tomorrow's to-do: see if it will support two clients at once, see if I can make router mode work, and see if router mode will support two clients at once.

My trusty D-Link router has been getting progressively wonkier of late. ddmerillat and I find that we have to restart our respective wireless clients a bit more often than seemed necessary. I'd already been contemplating an upgrade to something that can take open-source firmware, hoping to repeat my delight with Rockbox on my jukebox. If I bought two of them, I'd be able to have wired connections for devices in the living room. Obvious beneficiaries would include the Xbox, a Series 3 TiVo if they ever release it, and my Mother's Mac Cube if I ever hook it up, which I'm unlikely to do until I have easy networking for it.

The router of choice for these funky firmwares is typically the Linksys WRT54G line, which includes the WRT54GS and the WRT54GL. Sadly, the WRT54G and WRT54GS have been "updated" to use cheaper components that make them worthless from the perspective of putting third-party firmware on them. The WRT54GL is an older generation of WRT54G, sold specifically to appease the folks who want the third-party stuff. Hilariously, there's no incentive for Linksys to advertise its distinguishing feature: it's based on the old design! It's intended for nutcases like me, which means, of course, that finding one in a retail establishment is nigh impossible. Just for kicks, I armed myself with a list of serial number prefixes and hit the local office supply place tonight, hoping to luck into a WRT54G or GS that had been on the back of the shelf. I scrutinized about twenty boxes, only to find that every last stinking one of them was of the newer vintage. I suppose I could hit the web, but I would like to have it before the contest webcast starts next week. *sigh*

I recently used CoPilot to help some chorus guys. Both of them later remarked at the speed with which I'd operated their computers. In both cases, I'd gone in knowing what I wanted to accomplish. In both cases, my tasks were largely within the confines of familiar interfaces. With all that in mind, the fact that I went pretty quickly made some sense. This wasn't the first time people who don't spend as many hours a day in front of a computer have told me I was quick. I don't usually feel fast when doing these things, but Jakob Nielsen's latest column may have shown me just how much faster I might actually be. Hmm . . . yet more fodder for my web usability class. Mua ha ha ha!

I spent some time in co-worker Robyn's office today hunting down a mistake I made six months ago that had only reared its ugly head last week. Her computer's clock was off by a few hours. Initially, I suspected that her time zone was set incorrectly, but we couldn't find a setting to fix that. We ran ntpdate to sync the clock with a time server, and the clock immediately showed 3:14 on 3-14. Woo hoo!

Cousin Tom and family came to Mother's for dinner tonight. Tom hoped to check his work email from my laptop. I'd been using the travel router and the wireless card for two nights now with no incident. When I took it down for Tom to use, I couldn't get a valid DHCP lease. Tom wasn't up to walking upstairs for me to use the wired card, so no email for Tom. Grr! I'm resorting to wired now, but I didn't bring the fifty-foot cable with me, thinking I was good with the wireless. I hate computers.

Today was the first attempt to use the travel router as an access point. I'd already had plenty of success using it as a wireless client, including allowing Rob and I to have dueling laptops in the living room. I've now got the AP mode working, but it wasn't pretty.

( IP juggling, firmware flashes, and the big reset button. )

All is fine for the moment, but I'm sure I'll find some delightful new problem the next time I try to use it in this mode. I'm sure that having a dynamically assigned IP for the router will bite me eventually, but it certainly gets around the problem of trying to talk to a machine that otherwise appears to be on a completely different Class A network! It's especially troublesome that Mother's router will only allow Class C and smaller netmasks, preventing a single DHCP lease from providing access to everything behind the firewall, even if it means temporarily sacrificing access to everything else.