It will most likely not be a surprise for most people who have used a computer for more than, say, a week, but I still gotta say it: All $foo sucks, and $bar doesn't help.

Allow me to elaborate: I was trying to change the gateway's address on my desktop, which my brother is using (or, rather, not anymore, more on that later), and I found it impossible. Apparently the .inf file for the driver is missing, or corrupt, or in some state in which it really shouldn't be. So, no luck. I add another IP address to the gateway, so that it corresponds to the one my desktop knows about.

Then I'm trying to change the wireless Access Point to the new gateway, which has a wireless card that can only be convinced to work using ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net) and the Windows driver. This proves to be impossible because the AP doesn't seem to be able to bring the link up after it's been connected via the Cat5 cable to indy (the gateway), and the problem is not caused by a cross-over/non-cross-over problem, because the same cable works on my desktop. It doesn't work on nacht (laptop) either, so the AP is basically glued to kiopa (desktop) via some sort of wierd happenings. I'm gessing it fried/they fried each other (more on why later) and that now the only way to change that is to re-install the 3COM driver on kiopa and get a new AP (I never liked the box anyway) but here's where the problems begin. No-one knows where the driver-cd is, and nobody thought of downloading it from the web-page (probably mainly due to the fact that there was no way to get to the Internet at that moment from kiopa) so I just let it be.

The Wireless-Internet connection is now actually working. I ssh'd into my computer using it's dial-up connection (since it's the only way to get a real IP) and downloaded some updates using the fast connection. It is nice. The problem is that we need to authentificate ourselves every few minutes. This was a bit hard for me since I was using a terminal session and lynx which doesn't take pop-ups very friendly. The only problem with this approach is that I don't get a public IPv4 address, which makes things much harder than they should. An IPv6 address is of course no problem, but getting to a computer where I can use the IPv6 address to ssh into indy is proving to be quite a chanllenge. Needless to say, these machines are running Windows

This brings me to my next point. The GNU/Linux machines at uni-leipzig have stopped working. I don't think that it's because of a problem with the application server. It looks more like a dead switch. The thin clients complaint that the link was down, and my mouse-clicks were not answered. So much for a stable system. Now the door is closed.

And now to the fall of kiopa. One day my brother mails me saying that kiopa is dead. There's no way to know way. The green "I'm alive!" light on the motherboards lights up, but there are no sounds coming from the BIOS, and nothing shows on the screen. A CMOS reset didn't help, so I guess I'll just have to buy a new computer when I get back home. I'll try to savage some parts, but I'm definately going for a 64-bit computer. That either means a G5 (expensive) or an Athlon64 (cheap, specially by the time I'll actually buy them), of which the latter is the most likely option, even if the former is without a doubt the cooler and probably better option.
I think the AP-being-locked-to-kiopa issue was probably a warning of the things to come. Well, at least I still have my laptop, which is good for anything except drawing pretty pictures on the screen at fast speeds (read: playing games at a decend framerate).

Sadly, I do not have the luxury of a fast Internet connection yet. The Wi-Fi is set up, but there's no DHCP server, so no go. Apparently the repeater at another village is not in such good shape (unplugged, apparently, and they don't know how to plug it in) and as it turns out, we're dependant on that node at the moment. Later we'll have several interconnected nodes, so it's gonna be really cool. If one node goes down, we may have two or three to fall-back on. Elegant, useful, as has geek-value in it ;)

What I do have is a IPv6 link to the outside world, thanks to freenet6.net (now at http://www.hexago.com), although only on the router-to-be, which is what I use as a desktop now. I really gotta set this computer up so that is actually works as a server, but I haven't managed to get the forwarding/NAT to work right, but it's gonna be ready Real Soon Now (TM) as are the mail and web servers.

The Wi-Fi adapter we got from the organization doing this uses the ACX100 chipset, usable under Linux thanks to Andreas Mohr and others (http://acx100.sourceforge.net), but my particular device (using USB) crashes. Well, it returns an error. I'll have to fill a bug report and hope for the best. The PCI version (and Card Bus, which is basically the same) do work well. USB doesn't compile under Linux 2.6, so I'll have to chase down that one (should be relatively easy, but you never know).

In about four hours I'm going to go to a meeting where we should receive a `device' to be able to connect to the Wi-Fi network and have a month of testing. This is gonna be fun. We'll probably take the 512kbps line, which comes for about the same as we're paying for flaterate dial-up. Then we take away the ISDN line, which is something like double that, and you get the perfect combination: We end up paying less and we get a lot more speed.

This is of course all well in theory. In practice, I'm not so sure about it. It is a 802.11b network. they could have at least up a 802.11g, since it's not really that expensive and we get a really good `intranet' (I'm not sure for what, but it sounds cool). This `device' should really be a router/repeater/whatever with a Cat5 port so that my magic-router-box can do it's thing. I fear it may be some sort of wincrap adapter that is really hard to get to work on GNU/Linux. An all-nighter trying to get it to work would definately be interesting. I'll see what they have to offer. Hopefully my next entry here will be over a broadband line. At last!