smug smug smug

Am feeling pleased with myself this evening for having finally solved a problem which had meant my home wireless network was not letting me access my featherhouse website and email server. I could get on to other websites, except for ones that were hosted by the same provider. The email server was an especial problem as a lot of my email comes vis the featherhouse address, and I send all my email using featherhouse as I can't use the uwe mail server to send mail.

Most irritating, as it took me a while to work out what was happening.

At first I thought that the service provider was down or flaky, as I managed to log on and send emails intermittently. Then I thought the server was just down in the evenings because I could access it all at work. I tried three different laptops, pc and mac. In desperation I tried plugging the laptop directly into the blueyonder box, ignoring the wireless router, and lo and behold I could access featherhouse.

This meant that the service provider couldn't have blocked me.

I talked it through with a very helpful friend and colleague, Richard Hull, who suggested I look at the wireless router and try putting it back to the factory settings. He told me that the IP address is dynamically assigned, so if I was blocked then all blueyonder IP addresses would be blocked, and he even tested it out for me that evening by accessing the same non-working sites from his blueyonder address when he got home.

So this evening I sat upstairs, connected my laptop to the wireless router, and started playing around with the settings for the router. I googled "connecting to wireless router to change login" to find the address to type in to access the settings page for the router : 192.168.2.1

And then I played around, reset the router to the default factory settings, then had to rename it, decide what security ( I went for WPA but need to check what is best and what works for mac and pc) put in a password, reboot a couple of times, and YAY! I can now lounge on the sofa downstairs, access my website, and send and receive emails.

I do like it when something works.