How I fixed my Wireless At Home

For months I have had a bizarre problem with wireless access. Every time I described it to networking folks, it baffled them. This was the situation.

My main pc is a 17" MacBook Pro running Lion. When I take it anywhere, wireless works perfectly. There are no issues at all. When I plug it in to a wired connection, it works perfectly. Nothing special….yet. At home I have a few Windows-based machines that are on my home network, but they are all wired connections. All of them also work without any problems. I have 2 iPads (1 and 2) and an iPhone that connect wirelessly, again, no issues.

When I run my MacBook Pro at home on a wired connection, there is no problem. But wireless had a problem. Everything works everywhere, except the MBP has a problem with wireless. Well, actually, thats not true.

The MBP connects without a problem to WiFi. It just cannot get out of my network. So the only problem is when on WiFi, my MBP (and only my MBP) can see my internal network but cannot get out onto the internet. Bizarre, right? It gets a little harder to troubleshoot, though. If I run a command like host www.google.com from the terminal…ready for it…. it works. But Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Entourage, Tweetdeck, etc cannot see anything outside of my network.

Bizarre, right?

So here is what I did to fix it. I went into the DHCP config on the access point and disabled all the DNS settings. Then on my Mac, I created a Home location and hard coded the DNS settings. Thats it. Everything on my network and beyond now works for my MBP. I absolutely do not understand why this is, but now it all works. And now that I have documented it here, I can completely forget about it and live happy!

EDIT: November 14, 2011 - I made a change this morning because I got tired of hard coding a DNS server for each client. I have an old ASUS EEEBox running Linux in a closet. So far it was just a DNS server. Now its also DHCP and everything is perfect. Gradually I'll move more services onto that little Atom-powered box.

How To Record A Nortel VoIP Call On A Mac

OK, I probably have a weird scenario which is why a solution was a bit more difficult to come by than I expected. But it turns out that the solution is a lot cheaper than I expected too. Here is the problem. In the next few weeks I'll be doing some online classes that are going to be lengthy. My voice will be heard by the students over the phone and the reception on my phone at home isn't so good. My company uses a VoIP solution so I thought I would try to go that route. But the phone system is from Nortel and the IP soft phone software runs only on Windows. AND I have to be VPN'ed in for it to connect. This is a problem because my main machine is my MacBook Pro.

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How to make it look like you tweet often….while actually sleeping

I go through phases. The last two weeks are not a good example, but for a while I was tweeting like a madman. Every hour I would say something….most of it was even interesting. I got comments from others wondering how I was doing it. Was I really awake and thinking interesting things throughout the day AND at 2AM and 5AM and 11PM?

Well, some of those days I was, but most of them was ….MAGIC! OK, maybe not Magic. My secret was an incredibly cool tool called BufferApp. It acts like a buffer for the cool things you say. Say a bunch of things in the morning, and it automatically spreads them out across the day. Like MAGIC!

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Books vs eBooks and Me

This evening I was walking back from dinner and on the way to the hotel I came upon the Barnes & Noble in Bellevue. This was a store I had spent a lot of time at when I lived in Bellevue so I was eager to stop in, especially since bookstores in the US are so different from those in Europe. As I wandered through the aisles, I was amazed at how differently I felt compared to my last time there. I just didn't care about these things. The idea of buying a physical book is just so foreign to me that I didn't even want to pick one up.

Today I live for my Kindle. I buy all my books on the Kindle. OK, maybe there are a few that are…um…acquired via other means….and there are a few paper copies that come from Amazon.co.uk, but for the most part, the Kindle is where I read everything. Its just so much easier and more comfortable to read on the Kindle that I don't see how a store like B&N will stay in business for much longer. Obviously I am not the only one who feels that way because the store was pretty empty. Back when I was still living in the US, this store was packed, even on Monday nights.

I then looked at the magazine rack and again I felt there was nothing that this medium offered me. I read my magazines on the Zinio app on iPad. I couldn't even imagine buying a physical paper magazine. Everything has changed.

How I Made A Personal Log Of Something

Ever since I installed the SSD in my MacBook Pro, I had these weird beach balls (that spinning cursor that tells you the machine is hung on something) every now and then. I had read the blog posts on OWCs website about strange issues with SSDs on the 2011 MBPs, but I didn't feel that that applied to me. There had to be another fixable reason. But it happened so rarely, it was hard to figure out if there was a pattern. Some days it would happen 2 or 3 times, other days it would be every 5-10 minutes. I wanted a way to record when it happened, so I created a little Beach Ball Log.

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How Not To Kill A Mouse

This morning I expected to come downstairs to a nice surprise. Well, I guess if it were what I wanted to see, it wouldn't be a surprise now, would it? No, what I wanted and what I got were two very different things. What did I get??? Nothin' McMuffin! Bupkis.

So the other night, I went down into the kitchen to get an apple and I had a surprise visitor there. Growing up, these surprise visitors took the form of ants and palmetto bugs. They were everywhere and the little ant and roach traps were also everywhere. You had to set them up in places where the ants would go, but the dog would not. It was always quite a challenge. The traps would fill up, but there were always plenty more to cover any food that wasn't protected.

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How To Wake Up Every Day When I Want To

Alarm clocks have always been a problem for me. I have an alarm clock one day, then it gets left behind in a hotel room. Or I rely on the alarm on the Blackberry and the phone crashes that night (that happened way too often). I try to use the hotel alarm clock and I get AM and PM swapped around. It wasn't until I had a reliable phone platform as well as an easy to use alarm app that this problem went away. EasyAlarms from Rogue Sheep is that app for me. Its just so damned easy.

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How To Do a Real Pause in a Batch File On Windows

Ever wonder how to put a 20 second pause into a batch file on Windows? I had that problem today. I was setting up some virtual machines on a virtual machine hosting provider and needed a way to launch 2 virtual machines from a batch file. I knew that the Windows Server 2008 domain controller took 75 seconds to boot, and I didn't want the member server to start until after the DC was completely up and running.

The command, PAUSE has been available to batch files forever, but it waits for an enduser to press a button before it continues. I want to just wait for a certain time interval. Well, it turns out there is another command available in Windows that does exactly what I needed. The command is TIMEOUT and I think it first showed up in Windows Vista. Add timeout /t 75 and your batch file will wait 75 seconds before it continues to the next step.

Perfect!

Instacast, One of My Essential Apps

I carry my iPhone with me everywhere. I listen to podcasts all the time. I hate iTunes. With an iPhone app called Instacast, I am able to satisfy all three of these requirements in one fantastic little package. Check out the video and let me know what you think.

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How I Finally Clued In To How Amazing ScreenFloat Is

This morning I was trying to read some docs for a cool little command line utility called XMLStarlet. Unfortunately the docs were written so that the sample commands referred to sample content defined a few pages earlier in the document. That meant that I needed a lot of scrolling back and forth to fully understand what I was reading. Thankfully just a few weeks ago I had bought a great little app called ScreenFloat from Eternal Storms. I was able to take a quick shot of the sample xml docs, then refer to it very easily while reading the example commands further down the page. Its kinda hard to describe, so I recorded a quick little demo for you to watch instead.

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