J_K9 @ Linux

Today: In Retrospect

February 12, 2007 on 8:01 pm | In Hyperactive |

Today has been quite successful and rewarding. I flew back home last night because I’ve got a week of holiday - this is where I first got WPA working on Ubuntu. My old router, a Linksys WAG54G, had been giving me a few problems over Christmas - its ethernet ports had stopped working. However, having returned home after a long period at college, I had completely forgotten about this..

One of my birthday presents was an HP Photosmart C5180 - it’s an excellent printer in its own right, yet it does much more. Not only does it print high-quality photos as well as standard documents, it also acts as a scanner and photocopier. However, I had yet to connect it to the network - I had barely had time after my birthday to set up the printer on my home network. So, I connected it to my router using a crossover ethernet cable and allowed it to configure itself automatically.

I checked its network settings after a few minutes and it had an IP address beginning with ‘169.’ - bad news. That is the IP address several OSs assign themselves when a DHCP server is unavailable and a static IP address has not been configured. As this had failed, I tried to configure a static IP address, but the printer did not show any network statistic once I had configured it. So, I placed the HP drivers installation CD into my CD drive and began to install it.

During the installer, I was forced to locate my printer before I could install the associated drivers - fair enough. However, no matter how many different ports on the router I tried nor which IP assignment settings the installer would not find my networked printer. I spent a total of about an hour - bearing in mind that installing the HP all-in-one software, even up to this point, takes several minutes - before I remembered that the router’s ethernet ports were broken. Plugging the ethernet cable into my laptop allowed me to verify this and, sure enough, the ports were broken!

I was slightly irritated because I could neither update my new Ubuntu installation on my home desktop nor connect the printer! So, I wrote down a few notes (ie. ‘buy a new router’) and went to bed.

I woke up this morning, showered, got dressed, and did my usual routine of browsing through my RSS feeds on Google Reader and frequenting my usual forums (ok, I’ve been neglecting that recently, which is mostly entirely due to laziness). After lunch, I went out to town and bought a Belkin F5D7633-4A (otherwise known as ‘Belkin Wireless G Plus Router’), another network cable so that I can network both my printer and my desktop, whose wireless driver does not support WPA, at the same time. I bought a mouse too, but that’s fairly irrelevant..

The Belkin router has now replaced my aging Linksys and is doing a perfect job. My printer is now network, and I have my laptop, desktop and family’s laptop all hooked up to it. Despite there only being HP software for Windows and Mac OS X (and those being almost 300MB large and distributed with the printer on CDs), my Ubuntu laptop was the first to successfully print a document over the network with it thanks to the inbuilt hpijs driver - and I didn’t have to install anything or download enormous files. Don’t you just love Open Source software?