Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Wireless & Updates
This weekend my DSL (in fact my entire landline phone line) went down. It turned out the exterior wires were "weather worn" according to ATT and needed to be replaced. My phone was out from around noon on Sunday until noon on Monday.
At first I didn't know the phone line was down, literally down. I had no online access, so after recycling modems and hubs and computer trying to get DSL back up, I finally checked the phones and discovered that problem and made my call to ATT repair. Anyway, when I turned on my computer I noticed a wireless network called linksys that wasn't password protected. It seems someone in the neighborhood has a wireless network set up and used the default settings and no password. That got me wondering about my own wireless network and how to make sure I really did set encryption like I thought I did once I got back online.
There is a program called Airport Utility that sets up the Airport Extreme base station I have. I found it, launched it and it said it was too old to use. I went to apple.com and looked for 5.1 and couldn't find it. I did find an airport extreme update package and downloaded it and tried to install it, but it also said the utility was too old to update. I finally thought of the disk that came with the base station and sure enough, that had the 5.1 version on it. I installed it, then ran the update package again and it all seemed to be running - did I mention these were the kind of updates where you have to reboot after loading? This time the airport utility I downloaded (2007-001) was something for graphite and didn't work, so I needed to go back and download and install a different one. So after a couple of reboots and reloads, etc. I start the Airport Utility and it tells me my base station needs a firmware update - sigh. So finally after downloading and installing a bunch of stuff - not all of it the right stuff - I can finally check my base station - and yes, it was password protected.
Labels: apple, computers, tech
