My friendly neighbor got wise and turned on WEP so I started scanning for AP’s in range with WEP disabled. Surprisingly I can connect to about 8 additional wireless access points in my girlfriend’s apartment with the WET-11 but most are encrypted. A few are not but the signal just isn’t good enough for a solid connection.
So the guys at BAWUG suggested I try building a parabolic relector based on Michael Erskine’s WET-11 template.
Unfortunately I only found it to improve the signal slightly. I have since received more feedback from BAWUG folks who had similiar poor results from their reflectors and they have suggested a 14 dBi patch antenna with the RP-SMA plug for the WET-11. Thats quite a big jump from the standard 2 dBi rubber ducky omni-directional antenna. I’m anxious to see how many AP’s I’ll pick up with this addition.
I just finished installing the Sourceforge project Gallery. Here are some tips to save you a headache:
After running the configuration wizard it recommends you to run ’secure.sh’ to secure gallery. This script changes the permissions on:
config.php
.htaccess
setup/
I recommend not running this immediately as you will probably want/need to tweak the settings in setup/. If you did already run secure.sh and need to get back into the configuration wizard:
chmod 777 config.php
chmod 777 .htaccess
chmod 777 setup/
I tried several steps to install ImageMagick and this was the winner for me: Installation Guide
If Gallery complains “I can’t find ImageMagick at the location you provided” then you probably made the assumption that it wants the home directory (ex. /usr/local/ImageMagick-5.5.7). After some trial and error I found out that it actually wants the utilities directory (ex. /usr/local/ImageMagick-5.5.7/utilities)
Has anyone else noticed that ‘Scheduled Tasks’ in Windows are not as reliable as a cron job? This is the third time I have found a scheduled task that seems to have come under some spell and just quits functioning. The behavior is this:
You check on a scheduled task and see its last status is “Unable to Start”.
You try to manually run it and nothing happens.
The fix seems to be to simply apply any changes. Somehow that kicks it in the arse and it magically works fine again. I usually just change the password on the task (to the original password).
At my girlfriends apartment I can pickup a faint unencrypted 802.11b signal from a nearby neighbor. Here’s how I created a Wi-Fi repeater to “borrow” that high bandwidth connection.
I bought a Linksys WET11 wireless ethernet bridge.
I connected the Linksys WET11 to an extra Linksys AP I had.
Then I configured the devices like this:
Linksys WET11
ssid – linksys (same as neighbor’s AP)
channel – 6 (same as neighbor’s AP)
IP – static 192.168.1.226 (changed from default 192.168.1.225
changed default password
My AP
ssid – notsleepy (different from neighbor’s AP)
turned off ssid broadcasting
channel – 11 (different from neighbor’s AP)
IP – obtain from AP1 DHCP
turned on encryption
disabled DHCP (obtains from neighbor’s AP)
changed default password
VOILA! Instant boosted signal! I’m mostly transparent except for the fact that I obtain an IP from his AP.
well directtv dsl service went out of business leaving me in a search for a new broadband connection. i signed up for bellsouth fastaccess dsl yesterday and this morning i could no longer connect to directtv. uggg. a quick check of my order status revealed that i was scheduled to receive my new modem in about one week. ugg.
i started reading newsgroups (on dial-up of course) and realized that my alcatel speed touch home dsl modem from when i had pacbell dsl in CA would work with bellsouth. sure enough it works.
i hate that stupid PPPoE crap so i configured my linksys router to maintain a connection with bellsouth dsl.
