jr conlin's ink stained banana

So, since it was way later than i wanted last night, and since i had a few other things i needed to work on, i figured i'd post this up today.

Getting the DS to play on my network was probably the most difficultly easy thing i've had to do. Easy, because once i actually had the information i needed, it was fairly fast. Hard because i'm a cheap, greedy bastard.

Let me spin for you a tale of wonder…

It all started after i got the DS. It's nifty and all, but there are just a ton of games that seem to demand being played with others. i could play with myself, but that would get the DS all sticky.

Now, let's talk for a second about my home network. Every machine outside of my office is connected up via 802.11g. That includes the mini-box in the living room and the big media box in the garage. There's a lot of reasons for this, but mostly they boil down to the fact that i'm married and Anne Marie doesn't want wires running all over the house. Plus, 11g gives me "enough" speed for now that i don't generally worry about missing the rest of the pipe.

Unfortunately 11g suffers from one rather annoying problem. If you run only "g" devices, things hum along at a cheery 36-54Mbps. However, if a "b" device joins the party, things drop to the slowest connection rate and you wind up with your whole wireless network chugging along at 8-11Mbps. The "b" guy is happy, but nobody else is.

That's why i wanted to build a second wireless network, this one dedicated to the DS. It could play all happy on it's crap-tasticly slow net leaving my beautiful highspeed network alone.

So, off i went to get me a cheapo 802.11b router i could establish the subnet on. Unfortunately, there was the constant reminder that "cheap" and "reliable" are almost never included in the same sentence/breath/planet. Neither the $9 USB nor the $30 router/hub provided me the sort of reliable connection i desperately wanted. (Granted, in retrospect, i probably could have gotten the $9 USB adapter working.) This, naturally, started concerning my "geek cred".

However, being old enough to realize that "geek cred" was easily outdone by "$35 dedicated adapter", instead i went for the Nintendo WiFi USB dongle. This is basically a USB access point with some dedicated driver and installation software to make things about as brain-dead as possible. Yeah, i'll save the geek cred for when it actually matters.

i spun up the CD, attached the dongle and…. Nothing. i could connect to the thing, authorize myself, but then i'd go nowhere. That's when i read the Nintendo Wifi Connection Help Page and saw that i needed two things. One, open a bunch of TCP ports and two, not use a machine running ZoneAlarm. Again, i'm pretty sure that i could poke enough holes through ZoneAlarm to get it working now, but ZoneLabs has a horrible habit of "correcting" your fixes and breaking stuff. (See: VNC is EV1L!!!!1!1!!!! which i have to tell ZoneAlarm about once every two weeks that, no, VNC is actually not a virus, but a program i need and to once again mark it as "permanently" accept.)

(Did i mention that i really need to find another firewall that is less brain-dead than ZoneAlarm?)

i was then faced with two options, so i decided to install the dongle on the livingroom PC. Spun up the disk, added the driver, poked the holes into the XP firewall, added the proper DNS entries to the shared network connection, and viola! i'm on line!

Plus, i can sit in the living room with my wife and play games while she watches TV, thus "getting me out of that damn cave" as she prefers to call it. Now i just have to explain to her why i'm sounding not a little like Father Hackett.