rant about routers

[The Old Man]

Darn, hexadecimal, this sure isn't funny, but you had me smiling here, kind of like listening to the voices inside my own head about wireless .....
But, anyway, to let you know you have company, i have 4 boxes on wireless, strung all over the house, most have some flavor of MS but a couple have Linux flavors changing boxes somewhat regularly for the same problems you discuss.
Seems that if the box is hooked to the router with an RJ45 it works pretty good and holds the values. But on wireless, all mine are Linksys (Comcast) 802.11g USB except one that is Linksys PCI 802.11b. Thats the one I can't get Fedora *or* SUSE to detect. So anyway, last week i phoned in to the SUSE store and ordered the 10.2 boxed set (w/manual) for sixty bucks, it comes with a year of tele support after you get it running.
So anyway, today i get this return (from an enquiry a week ago, the techies have been on vacation) phone call from Novell and they want to help me get 10.1 onto the wireless but i was trying to put a new 64bit box and couldn't even sit down at the present SUSE box today, so thanked him for the return call and said i'd just wait until 10.2 got here. He said that 10.2 "fixed a lot" of issues they had with 10.1, and would be glad to work with me to get 10.2 online even though they really didn't work a lot with wireless. (probably because Linux is usually wanted for servers and they are hard-wired not usually wireless). He said if i'd hook up a hard link to the router first off, the OS might set itself but if it didn't they'd be happy to work with me on the wireless. Oh, and he said if i'd pop up to the HCL list at ...linux-something/HCL (hardware compatibility list) there were some brands that people had tried and worked, but it was not a list approved by SUSE.
So anyway, thanks for the smile. Kind of sounded like an echo somewhere back in the deeper parts of my grey matter..... :-)

(edit, forgot to mention) Last week i took a hardware 'update' from MS that came from LinkSys. Shouldn't a done that. It dropped my transfer rate (system internal) from 54mb/s down to something like 3mb/s. That warmed me right up too. Funny part though, checking the online speed it was about where cable should be. Still wish i'd have not 'updated' my Linksys on that box. At least it didn't affect the other boxes. Am waiting on this new box to get the full version (not the trial/beta/etc version) of 802.11n. Until then i'll just use one of the old 802.11g probably the USB version as it seems that works better than the PCI card.