AP fun

Note to self: Never, ever, choose the "reset to factory defaults" option of network gear, unless you have its documentation handy somewhere.

Spent the better part of last evening (and a fairly large chunk of the night, too) trying to get an ORiNOCO card to cooperate with my Access Point, so that my brother, who's bought a laptop recently, can use it. Something's wrong with the damn thing; it works flawlessly in ad-hoc mode, but refuses to recognize the AP which I've got running at home. After many hours fiddling with settings on both the card and the AP, I tried to go back to square one, and chose the "Factory Default" option in the AP's web-interface.

Bad idea.

I can't seem to find the manual, and don't know what the factory default IP address is; "arp -s" doesn't seem to work; and the default seems to be to work without using DHCP. Darn.

The funny bit was that with the factory default settings, it suddenly worked, somehow; the ORiNOCO finally found the AP. Since this is a second-hand laptop, P1-based, it doesn't have a functioning battery anymore; so I powered it off, moved it to my brother, and powered it on again, only to notice that it now again didn't work anymore.

I gave up at that point. No wireless for him...