[OFB Cafe] Near Miss

[Don Spoon]

Last Saturday night my WAP quit working.  For me this is a "big deal", 
in that I have come to rely upon it.  It allows me to be "lazy" and a 
total couch potato.  I slowly descended down to the basement where it 
was located.  Everything "looked" OK but  just in case, I reset it. I 
slowly and laboriously climbed back up to my laptop to check it out... NADA.

Back to the Basement...  reconfigured everything and tried again.  Still 
NADA.   The wife had been watching all this and inquired if something 
was wrong.  "My world as I know it has ended!  The Wireless thingy is 
broken", I replied.  Since I had given her some shiney baubles for 
Christmas that she took a liking to, she has been remarkably "compliant' 
since.  "Can you get a new one tomorrow?" she asks. 

HOT DIGGITY!  I have a license to get a new wireless router!  With all 
the recent talk of Gigabit Wireless Routers, I stayed in the basement 
for the remainder of night shopping.  I settled on a D-Link-655 Gigabit 
"N" Wireless Router with a 4 port switch being sold at Best Buy for 
$99.99. 

Best Buy opens up at 11 A.M. here, so I grabbed a bit of sleep.  I 
saddled up "Silver" the wonder SUV and prepared the fastest route to the 
Best Buy, where the prize was located, on my new  GPS.  After a hearty 
breakfast I was ready to go procure the object of my desire!  Just 
before leaving I fired up the laptop and tried to connect again... just 
to be sure.  While I couldn't connect, I noticed that all my neighbor;s 
WAPs were up and running.  In addition there was a new one called 
"Linksys" that had a right powerful signal at my laptop!  Hrmm...  The 
default essid for my WRT54GS was "Linksys" and I had changed it to 
"spoon".  Just for grins, I tried to connect to "Linksys" with my old 
"key".  IT WORKED!

Bummer!  I seems like the essid had been reset, but nothing else.  Beats 
me how that happened.  If it had been a system reset, it seems likely 
that everything including the key would have been reset to the 
defaults.  Wonder if I got hacked??

Anyway, I am back to the old setup.  NO new Gigabit Wirelss Router 
:-(    Being Obsessive-Compulsive has its disadvantages.

Cheers,
-Don Spoon-