Zeno's Paradox
October 25, 2003 - Panther and Other Things

I stopped by the Apple Store to see how the "Night of the Panther" was coming along. I managed to pick up some dog tags for free. Since then, I've been at Holly's working on getting her set up with 10.3 and trying to increase the portability of her system so she can see haw cool wireless really is. I ran into a few snags along the way.

The original plan was to use a 233 MHz Dell laptop as a wireless access point and router for sending wireless traffic along SBC's DSL network. I ran into numerous problems trying to get the laptop to establish a PPPoE connection with the servers. I didn't succeed. So, for all those poor souls out there, a Dell Latitude CPi with a Belkin PCMCIA card connected to a SpeedStream 5360 will not network. At all. Not with EnterNet nor RASPPPoE. Not on a fresh Windows 2000 install with Service Pack 4 installed. I'm tempted to return the PCCard to the store and purchase a Kingston one (as suggested by tech support), but the better solution may be to purchase a dedicated access point. Sigh.

So instead, I made the PowerBook the router and the Latitude the client. I wrestled with OS X for a while trying to get the two to connect. I found out that instead of ad-hoc mode when forwarding traffic, the AirPort card goes into infrastructure mode. This took me well over two hours to figure out. Two computers, no access point -- ad-hoc mode? Not always.

I've also been using MacOS X 10.3 on the PowerBook I had sold Holly. I'm pretty impressed with it so far. Things seem to be much smoother and the upgrade was painless. I'm just debating whether to do a clean install on mine at home (instead of the current "archive and install" that I did before leaving for here). I'll probably leave it as is until I get some good backups, when I can putter around without worries.

Anyways, it's getting late here. Gotta go to sleep sometime. Mountain Dew is wearing off...

Posted by br284 at 02:32 AM

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