The Busman Takes a Holiday

[maradydd]

I basically skipped out on the Internet for most of last week. This was mainly because last year's router decided it was no longer interested in putting out a consistent enough signal for my WLAN interface to stay stapled to it long enough to do things like, oh, open a webpage. I am happy when things consistently work, I can troubleshoot them when they consistently don't work, but intermittent functionality interspersed with HA HA ONLY KIDDING makes me want to break stuff. Last year's router is now no more broken than it got to be on its own, but it has been replaced with 2007's never-used router, which was picked up at a Fry's in Vegas for something like $15, preemptively disassembled in case we needed it for a project we were working on that Defcon, and put back in its box still in pieces with a few extra bits attached. All the solder points are neatly covered in electrical tape, and it has red and black wires soldered to the pins of the 5V jack; I guess if we have a power outage we can run it off batteries. Also it works, which is always nice to discover when you put something back together. Clearwire, I take back most of the bad things I ever said about you; you are actually rather fast and reliable when used with non-gimpy hardware. Perhaps this summer we will share the internet on the beach at Oostende after all, with the help of the battery-powered router.

The router needs a name. For the last few years our naming convention has been "places that do not exist" -- thus far Arcadia and Erehwon. I am leaning toward Ruritania or possibly Latveria, though I note that Uncyclopedia's list of nonexistent places includes Belgium. The humour is hit or miss, but I cannot deny the truth of the following excerpt:

Belgium is the worst place to live during a Zombie Apocalypse due to the fact that there's more dead soldiers buried there than people.

I mean, if you're in Colma when the zombie apocalypse happens, the odds are stacked against you, but you'll be up against zombie hippies and dotcommers. I suppose our only hope will be if the zombie French and Germans hate each other more than they want to eat the brains of living Belgians.

The other cool discovery, in addition to Working!Router, was the SMT tweezers that I apparently also picked up during that Fry's expedition. These are no ordinary tweezers; they are large and sturdy with a business end that comes to needle tips, suitable for performing reconstructive surgery on fruit flies. I suppose I should really get round to converting a toaster oven into a reflow oven, since I now have most of the other tools I need to do serious tiny-circuitry work. The local hardware store even sells ferric chloride, though not in the handy solution form that Radio Shack dispenses -- no, here it comes in foul-smelling rusty orange lumps and must be weighed out by the gram. I can also obtain a wide assortment of useful acids, bases, and salts, in addition to the standard sodium hydroxide and 30% hydrochloric acid that they sell in the grocery store to clear out drains. I feel like I'm living back in Thomas Edison's day, when you could get kicked off a train for having your chemistry set accidentally set a boxcar on fire.

This weekend was also enochsmiles' and my third wedding anniversary, which would have been great had I not woken up with some gastrointestinal weirdness that forced me to instead spend the day puking myself stupid. (If you find that resultative construction unusual, I defy you to maintain any kind of intelligence while lurching to the sink every half hour to retch bile.) We are planning to celebrate this weekend instead; it will also be my little sister briaer's birthday, so that's two reasons to celebrate.

Finally, in the last bit of router-related news, now there are router botnets. This should surprise approximately no one -- "I bet I can put Linux on that" metamorphosed into "I bet I can drop a botnet on that" some time back, for values of "that" which can connect to the Internet -- but seriously, people, password your fucking routers already.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

We name our stuff with data processing capacity after deities and legendary figures. My two previous internal hard drives were Metatron and Hagia Sophia.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

As to imaginary places, have you thought of Grand Fenwick?

[stannate.livejournal.com]

How about Neutral Moresnet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet)?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

What a cool piece of history! Though, sadly, as it was real, not for a router name. I will have to go visit it, though -- "tiny countries or former countries" are high on our list of places to see. (We missed Andorra during our recent visit to France, but I will have their passport stamp yet.)

[toliban.livejournal.com]

Hello! Where did you get Andorra passport stamp?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I didn't. I was going to get one while we were in southern France recently, but the one day we were within reasonable driving range of Andorra it was pouring down rain, so we decided not to go there after all.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't need to password my router. They put a password on it at the factory.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

If you want a more cyber reference, you might think about Qwghlm. If you haven't used it already.

[attutle.livejournal.com]

The router needs a name. For the last few years our naming convention has been "places that do not exist".

Elbonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbonia)

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

enochsmiles, whose naming convention this is, informs me that Elbonia was a now-dead AirPort. Good one, though!

All power to Tengil!

[michiexile]

You should name it Nangijala

I also like whswhs's suggestion of Qwghlm, though to be quite frank - you need two different devices for that to work: InnerQwghlm and OuterQwghlm. Preferably two devices that do almost the same thing, but talking different protocols - such as, say, a firewall and a WLan access point or so.

Re: All power to Tengil!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That's a valid point, I have to admit.

Re: All power to Tengil!

[vatine]

Or Nangilima? Or would that be where good hardware goes when it dies?

Re: All power to Tengil!

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

Inner and outer interface on a firewall!

Re: All power to Tengil!

[michiexile]

Oh yes! Definitely yes!

Re: All power to Tengil!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Another option would be "Labassecour," the fictitious European country that is the setting of Charlotte Bronte's Villette (named for the capital city); I understand that in fact it was modeled on Belgium! How's that for an arcane literary joke?

Re: All power to Tengil!

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Hah, that's beautifully obscure, and tickles my taste for self-referential jokes. enochsmiles is so far happiest with Ruritania, but once it goes the way of all silicon, I think I shall insist on Labassecour.

Re: All power to Tengil!

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh hell yeah! Although I do not actually have a hardware firewall. If and when we get one, though...

Re: All power to Tengil!

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Nangijala

Man, I love that book. Far more than the Pippi Longstocking books (though, amusingly, another access point I can see from here is called PippiLangkous, which is how you say it in Dutch).

Re: All power to Tengil!

[vatine]

It creeped me out as a kid. Not nearly as much as Mio, my son ("Mio, min Mio" in original) did, but, *shivers*.

[madeofmeat.livejournal.com]

I grew up not far from Colma.

The thing you'd really have to worry about in the event of a zombie apocalypse in that area is that fucking WYATT EARP is buried there.

GUNSLINGING ZOMBIES.

[lightning-rose.livejournal.com]

The Black Dahlia is buried across the Bay in Oakland, near a mass grave of unclaimed bodies from the Jonestown Massacre. Now that's gonna be a bunch of pissed off zombies!

[vatine]

There's always Kymlinge, the Stockholm suburb that was never built. It even has a tube station you can see from the train (but no entrance/exit to the surface, although the southern end of the platform is open to the air). Alas, there's also Kymlinge, the forest, so that may rule that out.

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

ZOMBIE EMPEROR NORTON

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

I did not realize that we need to name our routers. I'll mull over that one.

I'm amused by Ruritania as an option.

Let us know what you pick!

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Naming them is just a convenience (figuring out which router is yours gets awkward when there are twenty 'linksys' access points in range), but using a strong password -- at least eight characters, using both upper and lowercase letters and numbers -- is very important. The router botnets I mentioned are taking advantage of the fact that few people change the factory-default password; the botnets automatically spider entire IP address ranges looking for routers which still have the default password set, then install malicious software on them.

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

Interesting and good to know...especially as we are about to venture into router territory by getting a second computer.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

enochsmiles reminds me that I should be more specific -- the important password in question is the administrative password for the router itself (i.e., what you type when you connect to the router to modify its settings), not the WEP/WPA password (which you enter at your computer to log onto the network). Most routers have something like "admin" or "password" as the factory default; the instruction manual should indicate how to change it.

[arhyalon.livejournal.com]

Thank you to you both.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

We got our router from Earthlink, and their instructions for setting it up included selecting a password. Though their "passwords" seem to be purely numeric.