Wireless Networking as Black Magic
More proof that wireless networking is a new form of alchemy: I spent a good amount of time this past weekend wrestling with a recalcitrant wireless router (a DLink DI-634M). I had changed some of my cable services with Time Warner Cable, and they reset my internet connectivity in the process. My cable modem worked fine, but no matter what I did the wireless router wasn’t getting assigned a proper IP address.
After a few hours of modem/router resets, power cycles, and trips through the DLink config “wizard”, I found this post on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site which described a situation much like my own - direct connection from computer to modem ok, modem to router pfft. A few of the comments on the post helped me zero in on the possible issue, however. It seems that my ISP (Earthlink via TWC) wasn’t assigning an IP address to my router because it didn’t recognize (or like, or whatever anthropomorphized ISPs do when eyeballing MAC addresses) the MAC address of my router. So I reset both the modem and router to clear out the MAC address memory, fired up the modem again, connected directly to the modem with my laptop, and looked up my laptop’s MAC address for the ethernet adapter. That in hand I stepped through the router config again, but this time I explicitly assigned my laptop’s MAC address to the router. After the router rebooted I connected the modem to the router, held my breath, and there it was - a proper IP address assigned to the router.
Now, my router config sequence has a “Clone MAC Address” feature that supposedly will grab the MAC address of the computer you’re using to configure the router. Unfortunately, it was grabbing the MAC Address for my laptop’s wireless adapter, not the hard-wired ethernet connection. Now I’m wondering if all this could’ve been avoided had I configured the router by plugging into one of the LAN ports instead of doing it over the air. Now that it’s working I’m not going to mess with it to find out. I still feel like looking at the router the wrong way will break our tenuous technological armistice.
Predictably, tech support from Time Warner Cable during this whole episode was the typical scripted runaround - and as soon as the tech found out I had a third-party router he simply stated that it wasn’t their responsibility, since the modem (their hardware) was working fine. Not that I expected more, but I have a feeling that this is a fairly common situation, and just hearing “check the MAC address your router is using” would’ve saved me a bunch of time.
The downside of all this is that I almost had the perfect excuse to junk the DLink for a new “N” wireless router, but I suspect that I would’ve simply run into the same issue even with new hardware.
