The Lex Files

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid: Or, why I hate setting up Internet services.

My in-laws have used a cable ISP for the ‘net connection at home for a long time. And, sadly, it has for a similarly long time — stunk on ice. They would frequently — and I’m talking multiple times a day — have their connection drop out. No good. That’s troubling and frustrating and unusable all on its own, but it’s compounded when you use VOIP service.

A rep for their cable company who made one of several service calls told them that, essentially, they were screwed: The company wouldn’t be able to fix things, and my-inlaws would always have a cruddy connection. (Whether it’s an issue of location or something else, I’m not sure; the point was, the dropouts weren’t going anywhere.)

So, I suggested recently that they switch to DSL. They might take a small speed penalty, but probably not one that would faze them for their usage. And, I predicted, they would discover that a different connection could be way more reliable.

“Will you set it up for us, Lex?” “Sure!”

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Verizon DSL shipped them a fancy DSL modem, with a built in wireless-router and a four-port hub.

Now, that’s actually pretty cool. Combining the router with the modem is a no-brainer we’ve all longed for, at least those of us in-the-know, and it was nice to see it happening. The niceness soon ended.

For various reasons, including the size of their home and the aforementioned VOIP service, using the modem/router/hub alone wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to have the DSL modem in the basement connect to a wireless Linksys router, which connected to the VOIP adapater, and which also connected (through in-the-wall wiring) to a second wireless router, a NetGear, upstairs.

(For a long time during the setup process, I didn’t know that the router upstairs was also wireless. This caused more than an hour of frustration as I worked alone, resetting what I thought was the only wireless router in the house, and seemingly have it retain all its settings. Stupid, stupid, stupid.)

Ignoring my parenthetical hour+ waste of time from not knowing the full setup in the house… There was still one big, stinky problem: Default IP addresses.

Quick, over-simplified explanation: Every connection to the Internet is assigned an IP address. You know what they look like: 123.456.78.90. Wireless and wired routers need to assign themselves an IP address, too; that’s simply the way it works. But what if a wireless router assigned itself the IP address 234.234.23.23, and that IP address happened to be the same as an IP address for Google.com? (It’s not; I made it up.) But to avoid any potential conflicts, there are a few “fake” IP addresses that routers can use that no site or connection on the Internet uses — they are “reserved.”

Apple Airport base stations use a “10.0″ address by default. Most Linksys routers use the more popular “192.168″ address block.

No big deal. So the Linksys wireless router I wanted to connect the DSL modem to wanted to use 192.168.1.1 as its default IP address. Who cares?

Well, the DSL modem cares, for one. Its default IP address out of the box was — you guessed it! — 192.168.1.1. Oy.

Not a big issue, right? I’ll just tweak the wireless modem’s settings by accessing it directly through its IP via a web browser on a PC connected to the modem, and then I can change its IP address. And this line of thinking was, in fact, accurate. Of course, Verizon hadn’t told us the default login for the DSL modem, so I had to Google around quite a bit (with the spotty cable connection into the house) to figure out that by default the modem used “admin” as its username and “password” as its password, which differs from the default Linksys login of a blank username, with “admin” as its password.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

So I connected to the modem and changed its IP address (to 10.0…), and everything blew up. Metaphorically. But for reasons I refuse to think about any longer, changing the IP address on the modem was just not working well. Every time I tried it, Verizon would once again make the computer in question go through the DSL setup process. (I’d try to hit “google.com” and be redirected to the DSL activation page, and I would get stuck in an endless loop because at the end of DSL activation, it would reboot the modem, which would revert back to the friggin’ 192 address.)

Okay. So perhaps instead I should change the IP address on the wireless router. Oh, excuse me: Routers. That’s right; both the Linksys wireless router and the NetGear wireless router used the identical default IP address as the DSL modem that started this problem.

Say it with me now: Stupid, stupid, stupid.

How do you change the IP address on a wireless router? Well, you also have to figure out the default password for the NetGear wireless router — which, remember, you didn’t even know existed when you started setting up this lousy connection anyway. And the laptop I was working on was wired via Ethernet directly into the DSL modem, which meant that when I tried to be online and then go to the 192. address to configure one of the two wireless routers — which were conflicting with each other since they shared one IP address — the modem figured I wanted to configure IT instead.

See — it really IS stupid that they all ship with the same IP address.

As it turns out, I had to disconnect the laptop from the Internet (i.e., the modem) and wire it directly to the wireless router. (Makes perfect sense — wire the wireless.) That way, the laptop could find the wireless router by IP, and I could change its IP address directly. Then I went upstairs and did the same with the NetGear. And then I could finally connect the DSL modem into the basement Linksys router, which wires to the upstairs NetGear router, with all three of them happily chugging along on separate IPs.

But it was a sucky process, and one that I don’t think would be particularly obvious to even a bright non-guru user. I mean, I even knew about IP addresses and defaults and whatnot, and knew what had to be done, but struggled for a long time to make it happen.

And that’s stupid, stupid, stupid. And that’s why I hate up setting up Internet services. So if you need help with YOUR new ‘net connection — no. I won’t do it.

Unless you bake me cookies or something.

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