435 words
I just endured what hopefully is the last episode of our wireless networking desaster. So far we bought a wireless to ethernet bridge, a internet switch and wireless router and an external antenna. The total working internet connection we got out of this was none, zero, nada.
More precisely, we did see the wireless network (at up to 25% strength which is said to be enough but nobody has documentation as to what those numbers actually mean) but we didn't get a connection – or rather an IP address assigned via DHCP. That is odd. Particularly when connection to the same wireless network via Airport gives you an IP address without a problem. And also when you know that the bridge will forward DHCP packets (having tried this out using the covenient button of the internet sharing preference pane ;)
The solution to that problem is of course once more beyond all logic and thus and excellent example for the general high quality of IT soft- and hardware: DHCP does work in principle – just not on that particular combination of access point and bridge hardware. I'd suggest ending world hunger by making everyone engineering, manufacturing or peddling those devices explain that 7-layer model thing, explain to us how it applies here and make them donate a monthly wage for every mistake they make. Stupid fucking morons.
But even that shouldn't have been a problem, seeing that the people in the wireless junk shop had given us a couple of static IP addresses to try manually. Those didn't work either, as didn't any other plausible addresses we tried.
So back I went – to the wireless store. It turned out that they had bloody given us the wrong fixed IP addresses. Morons. And of course working in IT for long enough seems to make it perfectly acceptable that you have completely broken configuration interfaces which crash all the time. So they didn't think I've had a bad experience with the bridge device.
Also insert a rant here asking how it can happen that you have a handful of awful JavaScript laden 'web pages' as a configuration interface but the device is incapable to give you a continuous stream of numbers showing the current signal strength. Single numbers, nothing more. In fact that would be much more handy when trying to position an antenna for best signal strength, than web pages that load on a direct ethernet link at the speed of the 1993 internet with a web server that just crashes and has to be unplugged after five requests or so.
Computers == Bad experiences.