Come gather round people.... (yes I've been listening to too much Dylan lately).
So my trusty 4 year old wireless router (netgear wgr614 rev1) apparently gave up some sort of ghost recently. The ethernet ports still route, and the wireless still sends out a signal, but I can't get an IP address via wireless to save my life. (Which I was able to do at some point the in recent past). When I try to connect to it, it just hangs waiting for an address. I'd normally complain about something like this, but since we live in an age where anything electronic wears out faster than a newborn grows out of size 1 diapers, I'm pretty jaded right now.
Luckily Office Depot sent me some sort of $20 off any purchase of $75, so I figured I might as well get a new router. Maybe one of them fancy ones with WPA or something so my neighbors can't steal all my precious data. (Sadly, non of my neighbors have wireless either, so I can't just borrow it from them....)
I ended up purchasing a D-Link, WBR-2310. (I also ended up not getting $20 off my purchases, since the fine print on the back of the coupon said it wouldn't give the discount if they purchase was of "technology"...., talk about a stupid coupon, but I digress). Oh, I said I was jaded before, well, now I'm bonafide jaded, because I also bought one of them 2-year insurance policies for my new router.
So anyway, the point of this post is not to make fun of the silly coupon that caused me to spend $150 on "technology" thinking that I'd get $20 back. The point is that I open up the CD that states "BEGIN HERE" and the first thing I see is an Linux Penguin and an Apple logo and the text: For Mac and Linux users please use the documentation on the CD.... Very cool. Not as cool as if the logos were on the actual box of the device, but cool nontheless.
It looks like normal companies are starting to see that people are using linux! Whoda thunk it?
Sadly, the WBR and all of it's "Rangeboosting" technology is going to be returned very soon. It doesn't play fair with my ActionTec GT701 dsl modem. (I can't even use wireless or the wired switch with that son of a gun).... So maybe I'll just update to a Netgear WGR614 rev7 (or whatever they are at now) (I like the web interface of Netgear much better anyway).