h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Amazingly enough.

I'm sitting at one of my sister's houses, in what most people would probably make the formal parlor, or "living room" as it's know in local vernacular. This one is the main house computer room.

It the youngest of my neice's birthday- she's 12- and I came up to eat steak & potatos & sing happy birthday & eat cake and see all the relatives & whatnot.

We even tried to get Ken (my brother-in-law's) network up and running- to no avail.

He's got some piece of second=hand junk upstairs in the attic, and it's connected to all the cat-10 cables he snaked through the openings in his house-frame made by the cable & electrical installers. It looks like a 13-port hub- but I don't think that's quite what it is. The documents I've been able to srounge up for it on the internet say it's a "concentrator", and generally describe it's usage as connecting groups of sub-nets to other sub-nets and perhaps serve as a bridge between these networks and a telephone network like a PBX or something.

At any rate, it won't let any of the computers on his (hopefully) soon-to-be household LAN talk to each other through it- though the proper lights flash and blink to indicate traffic when an attempt to ping another host on the LAN is performed.

If only he had a plain, simple, dumb, HUB to plug all of this into, as I had suggested he should have! Of course, he told me that the gizmo upstairs was a hub, and it certainly looks like one. Shame on us both!

His only back-up solution is a micro$loth "wired base station"- which is your basic router finagled so it can't be run without having windoze installed on at least one computer, and it want's to be your internet gateway (via your DSL or Cable modem)- in fact, if it doesn't get control over this resource, it won't install (though I imagine you could fool it with a linux firewall running a DHCP server and IP masq). Every other router I've ever dealt with has had a simple web-based or telnet-based interface to set it up well enough for everything on the local LAN to talk to each other- irrelevant of the WAN connection (a DSL internet connection in this case) and it's status. Even if it came with one of those "wizard"-type interfaces
for configuration in the windoze enviroment.

In other words, the functionality of the devices is needlessly complicated and limited in order to firmly tie it to the windoze operating system. Much as Lexmark needlessly complicated the way it's printer cartiges communicate with the printer- and got an injuction against an after-market producer of lexmark-compatible printer cartriges (who were selling their cartiges at a considerable discount from the average $35.00 US the genuine lexmark cartriges sell for) based on the DMCA- because the needless-complication to bar compeetition used an encryption scheme in it's communications.

I hate those kinds of obtusification and complication. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING irks me quite as much.

Oh, well.

Anywaze, I felt like writing something, and the space was available...