Wireless old iMac via Linksys
inluminent: Wireless old iMac via Linksys
Ah ha. It was just a matter of trying some different keywords, and finally I have paydirt. This blog entry describes getting an old (no air-port, just ethernet) imac onto a wireless network the easy way. After much misinformation, this suddenly makes sense. I will be returning the access point (which came well recommended but how it was going to help was always a mystery to me), and procuring one of these wireless bridges.
4 Comments:
Follow up. This has worked really well. We got the D-Link wireless bridge and got it configured and on the network without too much fuss. We've since relocated the iMac to another room and given many thanks as all we had to do was pick it up and move it without any need for re-wiring.
glad you found my weblog entry helpful
-john
And further more, when that iMac died and we (reluctantly but gleefully) bought one of the new fancy flat screen ones (sans air-port) we just moved over the ethernet tether that goes to the bridge, powered it up and it that was that: DHCP did its thing, we were online, and all networked. No configuration necessary.
To close this saga: Apparently everyone got wireless routers for Christmas this year, because several new wireless networks showed within range at home. This spurred me to finally lock down ours..so I set the router to use WEP (128 bit encryption), turned the access list of MAC addresses back on, and started updating all the wireless network configuration on the client boxen.
My work laptop - worked just fine. My old win98 box - also fine. The new iMac is of course wireless ready, but I was still using the D-Link DWL-810+ wireless link. When I updated its settings it power-cycled and never came back up. I unplugged, re-plugged - still the activity light was looping over a blink, blink pause sequence.
I reset, no change, and finally got it to dump its firmware entirely and resolved to start over. But it wouldn't take any firmare - I got the screen that prompted for me to upload firmare, but it still never came back up. I tried the latest, and several older version of the firmare.
Tech support - turns out this product is only supported till Feb 2005. Just in the nick of time. They had me try all the things I tried already. Meanwhile I googled a little and found a review on Amazon amonst all the positive reviews, saying dont buy this product - it has a serious bug which causes it to fail when you first enable WEP.
I pointed this out to tech support, and was promptly redirected to their RMA department. RMA stands for Return Material Authorization. In other words, its irredemably screwed, sorry, we'll replace it for you. I'm still baffled as to how a product makes it onto the shelves with this serious a problem. I used the provided interface to enable a supported feature - and it fried it so effectively it wouldn't even accept its own firmware again, rendering it utterly useless. Wow.
Looks like they will replace it (though who knows if the new one will suffer the same problem). Meanwhile I ran down the the Apple store and picked up an AirPort Extreme Card, which installed and configured as documented.
The End.
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