Network follies

Victor was having some connectivity issues between his computer and our wireless router the other night. He looked up the Linksys tech support website and it said that the fix to his particular problem was to update the firmware on the router. He downloaded the file from the support website and followed the instructions to perform the update.

Near the end of the process, the router stopped responding. It's now caught in a half-way state between being a wireless router and being a brick, with its preference given to being a brick. Of course, because the router isn't working, we can't get out to the internet . . . which is a mild inconvenience at first, proceeding quickly to becoming the same level of irritation experienced by heroin addicts deprived of a fix.

Externally, from the status lights on the box, the router is pretending to work, but it's not providing connectivity to the two computers linked using ethernet cables, nor is it allowing access to the administration panel when we try to access it using the default address. It might actually be working, as there's a new unsecured wireless router showing up in our area, but we can't be sure whether that's ours or someone else's.

Talking to the folks at Linksys technical support hasn't been fruitful between the accents of the tech support folks and the attempts to pass off the problem as being our internet connection rather than the wireless router. No matter how many times we say that the cable modem is still working fine and that the problem occurred when we were updating the firmware on the router, it's still clearly assumed that our problem is of the "is your router plugged in?" category. Frustrating.

We still have our old router, but if we re-install that, Victor will be out of luck for wireless connectivity. This is one of those times when technology seems to be more in the theory than in the practice.