A few weeks ago I went to mashed. I used the opportunity to resurrect MusicBrainz’s Future Proof Fingerprint function, which I discovered had recently been ported to Java. I managed to automatically find when Jo Whiley played the same song in different shows. I didn’t win anything, but it was fun. I’ll get around to tidying and releasing the code some day.
Nice coverage of mashed was provided by the BBCs click online programme.
A friend of mine is using a wireless router connected to a cable modem to share internet access throughout his household. It worked fine for several months, and all the rest of his household and visitors could connect to the internet.
Then he reported to me that after his fridge broke down and blew the fuse in the electrical ring main, on restoring power the internet would function on his laptop, but not for any of the other laptops in the house. He hadn’t changed any settings - he was using his laptop wirelessly through the router, and that worked, but when others tried, it didn’t. I connected my laptop to the network, got issued an IP address and gateway by the router’s DHCP server as usual, was able to find and ping other machines on the network, but was not able to get any external connectivity. The external network couldn’t have been down, because my friend’s laptop was working. It was just everybody else’s that wasn’t.
After scratching my head for a while, and trying to fix the problem on my laptop, I decided to double check the settings on his laptop. Then I saw a strange thing. Despite him being connected wirelessly through the router, instead of having a local IP address issued by the router (like 192.168.2.nnn), he had the real IP address of the internet connection as issued by the ISP. Then I checked the cables on the back of the router. It turned out that the cable modem was connected to one of the LAN ports, instead of the Internet port on the router. As a result, all the computers wireless LAN were effectively directly attached to Virgin Media’s LAN with only a switch, instead of with a router.
When we set the system up, we had to register the connection using his laptop, then clone the MAC address in the router. The MAC address of his computer was therefore recognised by Virgin Media’s DHCP server, and it was given a valid external IP address and router, and worked, using the wireless segment as a bridge. The rest of the network formed it’s own subnet on the same cable using addresses supplied by the router, but could not get any external connectivity.
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