Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (dmr) passed away some days ago.

dmr is widely known primarily as one of the Unix and C fathers. He’s also the co-author of the famous “K&R” book, “The C programming language”.

From my point of view the IT world lost a great man whose echo still lives on in many technologies. I would also like to pass on my condolences to his family and friends.

Yesterday I bought a Linksys WAP54G AP to extend the networt to the air here.

First steps

First, I only had problems. I had a problem connecting to the webinterface, because the manual mentions the wrong default user/pass pair for logon. Sick. By the way, this is the same manual that says that SNMP is the standard internet mail transfer protocol. Fsck it. I usually read manuals – but this one is just able to heat the air when you finally burn it. Maybe not even that.

Then, after finally logging in, I found this buggy, ugly and crappy webinterface. What a user expirience. Shit. At least it works to make the basic settings.

The AP finally worked for my wireless devices.

And then tests. Well, the firmware is not even able to do station monitoring or some other basic stuff. Argh.

The solution to all the problems and crap

DD-WRT… Flashed the thing (okay, I bricked it on the first try, my fault), booted, logged into the nice and usable webinterface, made the basic configuration, ready. I have shell access, basic tools, a Cron, remote syslogging and some more features (a rich featureset, compared to the original code image).

If you are able to put something like OpenWRT or DD-WRT on your lower priced Linksys devices: Do it.

Rant to Cisco

Are you really sure you want to put your Logo on this device? The original firmware sucks and the manual is written by idiots. Nothing I usually have in mind when I hear “Cisco Systems”. I’m aware that this is consumer hardware, but a bare minimum of quality should be there. For me, Cisco stands for high performance, reliability, quality – this thing, that carries a Cisco logo, is just a shadow of the functionality and quality of a Cisco console cable!

Also: On the internet I read in far too many forums that the technical support from Linksys is as good as no technical support. I’m glad that I didn’t need it.

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