My wireless stuff arrived today. Almost missed the postman, I was watching him write some stuff down in his van while thinking “Why’s it take him so long to write a delivery note?”. He saw me and waved me over. He was going to leave me a note and take the box to the PO. I think we need a doorbell.

Plugged the card into the laptop, plugged the Access Point into the network. Lights flashed, Windows churned…and churned… eventually it said “AHA! You’ve got a wireless card… gimme a driver for it then”. Driver CDs were fed, more lights flashed.

Well it recognised the card and claimed I had an 11MBit link. Couldn’t send data across the link though. Had to go out so packed the laptop up and went off.

Turned the laptop on… or at least pushed its power button. Nothing happened. My laptop appears to have gone strange and won’t power up on battery power (battery is full!). No, this laptop doesn’t have a ‘Sony’ logo on it anywhere. Hope that by leaving the battery out for a long time something resets and it works again. Not a lot of use having a laptop with no battery, been there, don’t want to do it again :-/

Came back home for some dinner (i.e to play with new wireless stuff ;-). For some reason it just wouldn’t work… The card saw the AP, and the signal was strong. After much faffing around I got it on the network, and could ping the AP from a machine wired to the network. Then, for no aparrent reason, it started working over the wireless link! Then it stopped. Then started again. I think it’s sorted out now.

I’m a bit confused though. I can’t work out if the AP is a router, or if it’s a hub. It has an IP address, but I don’t think that bears any relation to the wireless network.

Now to set up a VPN and move the AP onto its own network segment to keep the wardrivers out (there are no wireless networks in this building I’m currently in BTW ;-).

Oh, and I don’t know if it was intentional, or by mistake, but the hardware I ordered was some ‘value’ hardware, and the stuff I got sent is ‘Belkin’. The same stuff on sale in PC World for 140 quid for the AP alone :)