I picked up the Linksys Wireless Network Expander G last week and gave it a quick setup the other night that didn't work. It was late, and I didnt feel like monkeying with it, so I put it aside and left it for this weekend. That didn't help til now, as we did a network reconfig at work Friday night and that took us til about 12:15... AM. I could hardly see when I drove home I was so tired. Five hours later I got a support call. (sigh). I showed up back at work at 12:30 and it took us til 6:30 that night to get everything finished. It's all done and pretty now.

On the way home, I stopped and picked up a few groceries, and some Honey Garlic Chicken at Canton (mmmm comfort food) I ate my chinese and watched $imdb(Dirty Dancing) on DVD. I probably would have fallen asleep and stayed on the couch til about now, except that somehow I got enough energy up to meet John & Matty down at Aqua Beach. Little Bucket showed up and we had to take turns holding her up. The poor thing weighs 90lbs and had a bunch of drinks into her. She was SO DRUNK that we signalled the bartenders that she was cut off, so everytime she ordered a round of shots, she got coke in a shot glass and we all got Jagermeister and she didn't even notice (until today when she called to say she was alive and I told her we fed her Coke)

So this morning I slept in. Bliss. I went and picked up the wheels from my old car and stacked them in the living room (quite stylish.... not) and I hope to shift them this week. That left me about five hours to get the network expander set up and installed two doors down before the Super Bowl starts. Our cable is still out, but we do get 4 or 5 channels now. Thankfully, FOX and Comedy Central are two of them. When I rolled out of the sack at 10:30, there was already a Super Bowl pre-pre-pre-pre-game show on. Ridiculous.

Anyway, on to the network. I plugged in and hard-reset the Network Expander (isn't that kind of a dumb name? You'd think they would have called it an extender or something...) and ran the setup wizard again, after disabling the firewall on my laptop. It still didn't work. I reset it and disabled WEP and tried it again. Nothing. I tried the auto-configuration button on the side. Nothing.

I disconnected myself from the network and associated with the Expander's SSID and gave myself an IP address on it's subnet. I was able to see/get to it's Admin page and make some changes, but I couldn't get it to associate itself with my main wireless router. Next stop was to Linksys Support Knowledge Base and all of the support pages I found had to do with minimum requirements of your WAP54g and WRT54g firmwares. Not very helpful.

Next stop was MSN search (through the MSN toolbar/desktop search on my other machine.. Google Desktop Search on this machine so I can compare them) and I turned up an article on Tom's Networking showing how to manually set up the Linksys WRE54G. It included one vital piece of information that Linksys' support page and the user's guide failed to mention (and I failed to notice on the admin page): a field to enter in the MAC address of your router.

I filled in the WLAN MAC address of my WRT54G and tried it out. Nothing. I tried the LAN MAC address of the router. Nothing. I tried the WAN MAC address and still nothing. I re-set it back to the WLAN MAC address and this time it worked. The link light on the expander stayed red (it's supposed to be blue when it's connected) but I was able to ping my router while associated to the expander. Then, I turned WEP encryption back on on the router, then on the expander and then re-connected to the expander and here I am, live on the internet writing this. The link light is still red, but hey, it's working, so Im not going to mess with it now that it's working.

A side note... my ctrl key on my laptop seems to have stopped working. :$