Phase 1 complete…..
Last weekends APRS Summer Gathering inspired me to move forward with a long standing plan to turn a Linksys WRT54G into packet radio hub for my house. Check out my post from last week for the details.
Well the replacement 54GL showed up from Amazon and this morning after popping enough drugs to stop the dripping of my nose, I proceeded to replace the new 54GL in my home network. This was pretty straight forward process, drop Tomato firmware on the new device and then clone my setup. Should have been easy and was right up until I put it into service and discovered I had no internet.
It seems that the wonderful ISP Comcast gets all weird about flipping the MAC address which is connected to the cable modem. I thought they stop playing these games a long time ago. The 54GL device was happy to connect, but the cable modem wouldn’t issue it an IP address or allow it to push packets. I poked at it for a while, eventually plugged the other one in and it still wouldn’t work. I then plugged my macbook directly in and that still didn’t work. I finally yanked the power on the cable modem and waited about 30 minutes. PRESTO! Now it was happy to hand out a new IP address and let packets go out into the world of tubes.
God I hate Comcast. But phase 1 is now complete. I have a really old WRT54G to hack on and a backup WRT54GL just in case. Where is my soldering iron and screw driver?