Monday, March 26, 2007

.: Access Point Whore :.

In the past 6 months alone, I have had the opportunity to burn through 4 wireless Access Points (AP) in my house.

In honor of the departed, the poor APs on the right, from top to bottom:
1. Orinocco AP 4000 by Proxim - Dead after 3 weeks (firmware corruption)
2. 3Com OfficeConnect-G - Dead after 1 year (board malfunction)
3. 3Com OfficeConnect-G - Dead after 1 week (firmware corruption)
4. AP 2500 by Proxim - Dead upon first use (bad original firmware and config)
On the left, is my new and currently in use, Linksys Wireless-G. Let's see how long this baby can last.
And oh yes, I do have the bad habit of tweaking and torturing all my hardwares until they die miserable and painful deaths. Oh yes baby!

10 comments:

Jono said...

damn~! I've burnt 1 less than you! haha...whatd you tweak? Only stuff I do is port forwarding and wireless security stuff....

Leon said...

Usually, I just upgraded the firmware.

Sometimes, the upgrading process hangs, and when you reboot the router, it's booting up to a partial / corrupted firmware (OS).

The only way to actually resolve this problem is to send it back to factory, which I never bothered, warranty or not.

Jono said...

hahaha... and I thought firmware upgrades were fairly simple...

Pam Song said...

You guys definitely need better hobbies.

Jono said...

Unless we are going to start a thing for babies and join you....

Leon said...

jo-no,

firmware upgrades are tricky. Update involves re-writing the whole ROM in any device, and if for any reason the unit hangs, got rebooted or unplugged, you get a partially loaded ROM.

Hence, you can't even boot up the unit(s) properly.

3Com, especially, are prone to these kinds of problem, as the flashing of the damn ROM takes ages. and for that particular model, the manufacturer released 5 different versions of the firmware, to be updated one after the other upon first purchase.

One of the firmware release is about 2.5MB in size. Jesus!

Just don't buy 3Com man. If you want a good one, I heard belkin's pretty cool.

And ignore the feminist. Anything that's not feminine related is boring to her.

pam,

*sigh*

Jono said...

yeah, so I heard of belkin. Manyak bagus.

Pam, give it up. Your ego don't stand a change against that of two males.

Leon said...

Jo-no,

Belkin is the best AP for the home use range.

Industry strength however (as in for public and commercial use), people normally go for Proxim AP 2500 or AP 4000 (Like Timezone in Starbucks) or the Cisco AP1231G-A-K9.

Expensive stuff though.

Pam Song said...

I can't believe I'm about to say this but Leon's actually being nicer than Jono! Damn. That's a new low for you, Aussie boy.

Leon said...

I plan to take Jo-no as my protege, and train him up to be just like me.

After all, the world could always use a few more Leons. At the moment, there's only one of me to share among so many, so so many deserving people.

*sigh*

What if he resists, you ask?

*grins*

Nobody can defy the Dark Side. Nobody! Resistance is futile.

*grins*