I've complained before about the really lousy wireless network at our hotel. We only pay $3.99 for it, but my guess is that at either of our billing rates we've spent maybe a hundred times that in hours of phone calls to tech support, screwing around with wireless settings getting the connection to come back up when it drops out, waiting for the network's login page to load, running pings and traces to figure out exactly which part of the hotel network is screwed up this time, and so on.
That was last year. This year, things have changed. For the worse, it seems. It was a bad sign on new years's day when the front desk didn't have the new password (they change monthyl) and gave us an unfamiliar number for tech support -- I reached a not-too-friendly fellow somewhere on the other side of the world who needed some convincing that southern Connecticut was not a suburb of Chicago, and then could only repeat a scripted line about the local hotel node being down -- clearly why it was telling me I had the wrong password -- and that the system administrators would no doubt fix it when they learned of the problem, albeit he had no idea when that might be.
Then the front desk called headquarters and got the new password, and all was well. Until this morning. The DHCP server was giving out a whole different range of addresses (when it was answering at all), and talking to the outside world was out of the question).
So we went to feed Charlie and see a movie, and when we got home, the network was displaying this for a login page:
" tinyproxy 1.6.2
The page you requested was unavailable. The error code is listed below. In addition, the HTML file which has been configured as the page to be displayed when an error of this type was unavailable, with the error code 14 (Bad address). Please contact your administrator."
Gives you a warm feeling.
After another half hour or so, a working page started to come up (only took about ten minutes to load, most of that time looking for internal network servers) and we finally got to the outside world.
So, about that advice:
Don't change your network configuration and your tech support contractor on the same day, especially if the new contractor has no familiarity with your installation.
Don't turn off the old network-access system until the new one has been tested and proven to be running.
Strongly consider installing a set of access points that provide a clean, usable signal to all parts of the site you claim to serve.
Whee.
Posted by wallich at January 5, 2005 11:23 PM