Day: August 24, 2004

Once more: wireless printing

It seems that every time we move I spend a few hours reconfiguring our network so that we can print over WiFi to our LaserJet 2100M. This time, as I mentioned last week, the issue was physical; I couldn’t physically connect the printer to the wireless access point as I did before, so I ordered a wireless-to-Ethernet adapter, the SMC 2671W.

The adapter arrived last night, but what with the skunk attack and everything else, it took until this morning for me to get the box open and start working on it. As the reviewers on Amazon have commented, the setup for this thing is non-intuitive via the Web, so here’s how I went about it.

  1. Power up the adapter and connect it to my laptop via the enclosed Ethernet cable. (You may need to toggle the switch on the back between a standard and crossover Ethernet connection until you get a steady green light in the middle indicator.)
  2. Configure your laptop’s Ethernet address to something in the same range as the SMC’s default Ethernet address, which is 192.168.2.25 (I used 192.168.2.20).
  3. Open your web browser and point it to http://192.168.2.25.
  4. Use the Site Survey to find your wireless network and click on the SSID to join (note: if your wireless network does not broadcast the SSID, you’ll need to type this information in).
  5. Reset the IP address of the adapter via the Web interface to a valid address on your network. Because my base station serves as a NAT, all the addresses on my LAN are 10.0.1.* addresses, so I gave the adapter the address 10.0.1.254, and told it to use my base station (10.0.1.1) as a gateway.
  6. Reset your laptop’s Ethernet connection to obtain an address via DHCP.
  7. At this point I could connect to Internet sites through the adapter, meaning that the adapter had successfully joined the network and was accessing the Internet through the base station.
  8. I now disconnected the adapter from my laptop and connected it into the WAN port of my 10-port router, and connected the printer into the router. And darned if it didn’t work the first time.

So my network topology is now clusters of wired functionality connected only by 802.11b:

network map

Things come in threes…

…so after our dogs narrowly escaped getting sprayed by a skunk on our front steps last night, I don’t want to know what the other two things to come are going to be.

I opened our front door and our storm door at 10:30 last night, and the dogs bounded out the door and down the steps, where in a second I saw them start barking at something that looked like a big black raised tail. I saw the white in the fur a second before I desperately hauled the dogs back in, but it was too late for the front stoop. Lisa has hit it with a Clorox solution but there’s still a residual stink. And we washed the dogs, just in case. Twice.

Speaking to our neighbors, we learned that skunks are not uncommon in this neighborhood, and there may even be an albino skunk wandering around. So I guess that’s my cue to keep a sharper eye out.