Our hotel network sucks. Not only isn't it worth the $3.99 per-stay charge, it feels like we should be billing them for diagnostic services. For four of the first five days, we were on the phone to tech support pretty much constantly ("press 1 if you have ever connected to the internet using the hotel network...") only to hear every time that we couldn't find a network connection because the network was down. The system administrators had been informed of the problem, they said, but offered no information about when or whether anything might be done about it. "They don't generally send technicians out on the weekend," said one support person before hanging up.
Monday, when the network started coming back up, things got even more interesting. The wireless network bridge provided by the hotel didn't work at all, even though the wireless cards in our laptops appeared content; sometimes one machine would lose signal while the other one a few feet away was merrily exchanging packets. The network security system (such as it is) had an uncertain timeout, so that sometimes everything would just stop working and you would have to load the router's home page login an again to keep a telnet session going. Same with DHCP -- every few minutes, it seemed, the powerbook's airport card would drop signal, reaquire it but have trouble talking to the DHCP server and configure its own address. Sometimes moving just a fraction of an inch would make the difference between live signal and none. (Typical pings on a good minute yield maybe 20 percent dropped packet and at least one duplicate packet for every two or three proper ones returned.). Number of times the access point was visible but the rest of the internet was gone: too many to count.
Today when the network fell down again, telling us that the access point was unable to reach its password server, I tried reloading the login page only to be delivered to the administrator login instead. Don't think I wasn't tempted -- I clearly couldn't have screwed things up any worse than they were already, and it's pretty much a dead cert no one changed that password from its default... (now, pretty much whenever I try to get to the login page, the admin login comes up instead. whee!)
There are a few places in the hallway where the network signal strength appears better, but I have no idea whether we could changes rooms. And of course with the rest of the networkin such a mess, who cares about reception?
Posted by wallich at December 9, 2004 04:11 PM