Mo 'Puters, Mo Problems

What they say is true, "mo 'puters, mo problems". Ever since I got my laptop, I have had nothing but problems. At least the problems were not with the laptop itself though.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the wireless Internet connection wasn't working for shit. So, yesterday, I decided to cough up the 50 buck and by a new router. I got the linksys WRT54G:

It plugged in and worked pretty quickly. The wireless connection to my laptop was fast and constant. Now, the next thing I wanted to do was enable file and print sharing so that I could easily pull files off of my desktop and use the printer that is hooked to my desktop from my laptop. This ended up being much more of headache than anticipated.

The idea of setting up file and print sharing is really easy. You basically run the Windows network wizard and specify the same workgroup for all computers involved. I did this about eight times and still nothing would work. After many hours of banging my head and trying to figure out what the problem was, I found that my netBIOS service was not running. netBIOS is required in the LAN for file and print sharing. There was something corrupted with it and when I ran "nbtstat -n", it indicated that it could not be loaded. Usually, you would see a NetBIOS Local Name Table. Anyways, I tried everything, I even reinstalled the TCP/IP protocol that Windows ships with (this is not straightforward). Finally, the resolution was to uninstall and reinstall my network card. This fixed it! There must have been something corrupted in the registry that was preventing the netBOIS from loading.

Then, my next problem was with using passive FTP through my linksys router to my desktop. I need this working because this is how I publish my blog from Blogger to my web server. The only thing that changed was the wireless router, and Linksys support couldn't tell me what was wrong or how to fix it. The way passive FTP works is that it sends, as part of the response, an IP address and a port. The IP address is the internal IP to my network and thus is not available outside my network. So, there is a special setting on my FileZilla FTP Server where you can tell it the IP address of the router, which is available to the Internet. You also have to forward port 21 and a user defined range of ports for the passive part of FTP via the router. I had all of this setup perfectly and it was working with my old router. After trying everything in the book, I disabled the special setting on my FTP server that replaces the IP address with the actual IP of my router. I couldn't believe this, but it actually fixed it! The only thing that I can figure is that the new router is smarter than the old one and knows to swap internal IP addresses with the router IP address for outgoing requests and this was screwing things up somehow. Argh!

All I did was get a new dang router. I better not have any more computer problems for a while. I've met my quota for at least the next year.