Two days ago I booted up my laptop like always but ran into a slight problem connecting to my wireless network.  Thinking my wireless card was dead, I used Ana’s (same brand and model) with the same results.  Her laptop also worked flawlessly with my card.  Crap.  Driver reinstalls have done nothing.

From what I can tell, it picks up the network just fine but it just cannot pull an ip address from the dhcp server.  Tinkering around with it more has me wondering if there’s something wrong with the cardbus slot.  I guess it really shouldn’t matter, the 4 year old machine already keeps me wired with its 5 minute battery life, what’s an extra cable for network connectivity?

Sigh.

Now that our network is up, I’ve decided to do a little upgrading. My new server should be delivered tomorrow and will probably end up replacing 4 old, old, old (think Pentium, Pentium II) machines running Linux. To the dismay of some I’m sure, this new server is going to be running Windows Server 2003. There are a variety of reasons, none of which are all that interesting, really 😉
Anyway, the new machine is a horse. And a cheap one at that. It’s a Dell PowerEdge SC430 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium D (mmm dual core) with a gig of RAM. Price after the memory upgrade and before tax was something like $450. Once the machine arrives I’ll also be purchasing a couple of large hard drives and a RAID controller to use for backups instead of my old tape drive. To round out the upgrade will be a pair of gigabit switches to replace some older and failing 10/100 ones.

For those of you bored from this topic, this should be the last in the series Now, where was I..

One fairly recent Saturday we decided to take my antenna off of the chimney and just point it down the road to the other person with a laptop and determine if there was any signal whatsoever coming from it. The current working theory was that the sheet metal on the top of the chimney was causing funky problems with transmission.

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After building the antenna mount, it had to be installed. On my chimney above my second storey roof. Now, I’ve been the first floor roof several times (think Christmas decorations, etc) without any problems; but that first trip (and second…and third.. etc.) up to the second storety freaked me out. Since Jay’s such a good pal, he volunteered to attach the antenna mount to the top of the chimney. As it was getting dark outside, I strattled the peak of the roof holding a flashlight in his direction while he attached the mount to the chimney with a whole bunch of lag bolts.

Overall installation was quite simple (photos of both antennas forthcoming). We ran the cable down the chimney and through a new hole into my basement where we hooked it up to the access point, and then stopped for a while to eat some dinner. We were almost done!

After dinner we went to our respective houses and started a ping. It worked. For about 15 seconds. And those were the last echos we’d see for months.

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In preparation for installing the antennas, we did a little research to figure out how hard it might be to aim them. Google Earth provided us the information needed to calculate the vertical angles the antennas should be sitting at. Below is a map of the two houses:

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This will probably span multiple posts, as it’s a 7+ month long saga… Enjoy!

It all started when Jay and Katherine started looking for a house and we joked about needing to have a network between them. There was so much we could end up doing – backups, shared media, games, voip, etc.. The more we talked about it, the more serious it became, to the point of where it was obviously required. (more…)