Wireless woes

Ladysolly complained to me that although wireless access was working downstairs, it wasn't working upstairs.

The setup is this. I have a wired network all over the house. Connected to this is:

Downstairs, a TP-Link wireless router, and a repeater. That gives me coverage for all of downstairs.

Upstairs, another TP-Link wireless router.

I think what's happened, is that the upstairs router has partially failed. When I connect to it and ping the outside world, I get 25% packet loss, which is strange.

I think I've had this problem, intermittently, for a while.

So I connected up a Siemens DSL access point that I got off Ebay for a fiver a few months back, and set that up. It works fine, except that A) I can't tell it to use DHCP in the range 192.168.etc.etc, and B) I can't tell it which gateway to use. I want to tell it which gateway, because I have one which is a fast DSL, and one which is my reliable 2mbit leased line.

So I also connected up a Buffalo, which is several years old, and I can tell that which gateway to use. But not which DHCP to use. So I let it use the DHCP that it wants to use, and heaven knows how it decides. I don't think it matters much, because we'll only be using a handful of wireless devices at any one time.

So I've just bid on Ebay for a Netgear wireless access point. I have a lot of faith in Netgear gear, it's heavy and clunky and works.

And now the wireless network seems to be working. Ladysolly can access the internet from upstairs, but now she's complaining that she can't access her google email.  I'm thinking that this isn't really an issue for my network, because if she can access the internet, and problems after that aren't within my reach. She rebooted, and it's fine now. Which reminds me of a joke.


A statistician, a physicist, an engineer and a programmer were driving along in a car, and the car stopped working.

The statistician said "The maximum likelihood problem is that we've run out of petrol"
The physicist said "The engine has stopped, and we dont know why"
The engineer said "I'll open the bonnet and diagnose and fix the problem"
The programmer said "Let's all get out, wait a minute, then get back in"