Kathy contacted us, indicating wifi was down. Like previously (see June 24 2011 entry below), the wifi had stopped working, but Kathy could get access from her modem. The Wireless Toronto (“WT”) hotspot was visible but wouldn't offer net access. I went by, and Gabe guided me through problem resolution by phone.

As previously, the Wychwood Open Door (“WOD”) router (the one connecting the Wychwood modem to the WT router) no longer worked with the re-configured password. It was accessible using the factory default password, and a look at the console interface showed that the WOD router had somehow been re-set back to factory settings, as had happened in the past.

With Gabe's help, I re-configured the WOD router back to our setup for WOD (see list below), and was able to get net access via the WT hotspot once again. I tested access – it's functioning normally now.

WOD router setup for use with WT hotspot:

• disable Wireless
• set access type for the WOD internet connection (currently “PPPoE” - requires the login info for WOD's ISP)
• re-specify admin password (taped to top of router)

NOTES:

1. WOD router may be flaky, as this myserious re-set to factory settings has happened before - we may want to consider replacing it
2. Kathy mentioned that occasionally, WOD volunteers tried trouble-shooting the problem – this is great, but Kathy agreed that she would ask them to email her and cc: us to log what actions they've taken, to assist in future problem resolution.

Kathy emailed yesterday saying that the wifi was down. I went in today. She explained that it stopped working on Tuesday, but she was able to get her machine online by plugging it straight into the modem.

I plugged everything back in the normal way, and realized that the Wychwood router had been reset: it had the PPPoE settings in it (and went online right away), but the admin password was blank, and it was using the LAN IP address 192.168.1.1, instead of 192.168.99.1 as we had set it.

To prevent future IP address conflicts, I left the Wychwood router at 192.168.1.1, reset the admin password (which is taped to the top of the router), and disabled the wireless on it. I changed the Wireless Toronto router to use a LAN address of 192.168.2.1. I also upgraded the Linksys firmware on the Wychwood router, and set the Wireless Toronto router to get a DHCP address on the WAN side (previously it had a static IP address set, because we were having trouble with the DHCP server on the Wychwood router – hopefully the firmware upgrade fixed that).

It's hard to diagnose what the initial problem was. I'm going to email Kathy to ask her to try to reach me or Jon by phone next time they have a problem, before switching the wires around.

Kathy emailed a couple of days ago to say that when she got back from vacation, the wifi was down. I (Gabe) went by this morning. The computer had been plugged directly into the modem. When I plugged the routers back in, it seemed to work for a little while, and then stopped. It seemed like maybe a DNS problem, so I added static DNS servers to both Kathy's router (192.168.99.1, plugged into the modem, wifi disabled), and the Wireless Toronto one (192.168.1.1). That seemed to make everything work.

I didn't set openVPN up correctly when I first configured the router. It's now working.

Also: the DHCP server on Kathy's router seems flaky. So I gave the WT router a static IP address on the WAN side. I maybe should have done the same for the PC that's connected to that router.

(Jon suggested that upgrading the Linksys firmware on Kathy's router might fix the DHCP flakiness. That'd be a good thing to do next time someone's on-site.)