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).