Got Wills

I remember, just 3 years ago, some of my coworkers were making fun of me because I said that, given the opportunity, I would have a home network. Heh, you don’t see too many houses that don’t have some sort of computer network, now. Needless to say, I’ve got my home network and love being able to hack from my living room, the kitchen, and even the kids bedroom. Just today, I setup a new Linksys WRT54G on my network. It’s replacing the router / wireless access point functionality of the my SBG900. The default firmware was sort of limited, it didn’t even include WDS. That happened to be my main reason for purchasing the router. We recently got a computer desk for the playroom and stuck a computer in there for the kids (kids need the Internet, too). I didn’t want to run a cable from the router in the computer room to the computer in the playroom (Summer wouldn’t have liked an ethernet cable running across her kitchen, either). I happened to have a spare Speedstream 6520 (which has WDS if you have the right firmware), so instead of buying a wireless nic for the computer, I decided a router would give me more options (not to mention extending my wireless range to the bedroom and the backyard). However, my new router didn’t have WDS.

In walks DD-WRT… To be completely honest, I’ve been looking at DD-WRT for a while now, and wanted a router to put it on. I was really just watching ebay, but ended up charging a new one to our Dell account. I wasn’t completely surprised that WDS wasn’t on my WRT when it got here, it wasn’t in the feature list, but the latest version of the WRT54G will take the DD-WRT custom firmware, and WDS is on DD-WRT’s feature list. Anyway, I setup a NAT pass-through for my router, got all of my port-forwards, and reserved addresses configured, and even got the built in Dynamic DNS client configured to update my domain names. Unfortunately, the Speedstream only supports WEP when you are using WDS, so I MAC locked the wireless as a second layer of protection.

It sure is, even if it is a small kingdom… I’m not talking about my house, I don’t claim to be able to manage that. No, I am talking about my Web space. I love having control of phillipwills.com… including a blog (this), a web site, and a web site in development (it’s not much yet, but like I said, it’s in development.

I’ve just had a new idea for a web service today. I’ll not give any clues today about what it will be, but I’ll be registering the domain name in the next week or so, but I’m pretty excited about this. It could be a great service… if other people decide they need it, which they may not. Anyway, more details to come.

Well, we’re all moved and finally back online… actually, we’ve been online since Thursday afternoon. After tweaking my settings for half the night, my blog was back up the following morning. I’ve been trying to get to it all weekend, but it’s been extremely busy. We’ve upgraded from DSL to Cable which doubled our speed, so the site should be a bit faster.