Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Woosh broadband and the Linksys WRT54GL

I just got a Linksys WRT54GL, with the intention of hooking it into my Woosh wireless broadband. It was a bit of a mission, so here's what I did in case anyone else has the same equipment, and finds this post!

I hooked up the Linksys between Woosh and my computer. Then I ran the SetupWizard for the Linksys. The first 7 pages just check that you've hooked things up correctly. Then I told the WRT54GL that I had a PPPoE connection. This allowed me to enter my Woosh username and password. The "@woosh.co.nz" part of the username is very important!

Then I entered the WRT54GL's password, of which the default is "admin". Naturally, I changed this straight away as you can do at this point. The first time through I gave the SecureEasySetup button a go, but this was a step that I dropped on my sucessful run. So doing it manually, I changed the SSID away from the default. But it can be almost anything really. I left everything else the same on this screen, and went to the next one where I selected WEP 128bit for my security. Again, this can be almost anything, though I suggest some security. Unsecured wireless points are bad!

I entered a passphrase, and generated a WEP Key. Then the wizard tries to save the settings to the WRT54GL. This always failed for me at the point where it tries to detect the internet.

After some thought, I figured that perhaps both the WRT54GL and the Woosh router were both trying to exist at 192.168.1.1 . So, I logged into the web based utility and changed the IP of the WRT54GL to 192.168.1.2 . I also set it to only use HTTPS connection, though due to self signing certs I had to add an exception for Firefox. Lastly, I changed the Setup from PPPoE, to DHCP.

Now I was able to ping out from the WRT54GL.

Then I set up the laptop to use the wireless access point using the WEP key generated above. This was really easy so I won't go into detail.

The computer only needed one more crucial setting to make it work also. In Network Connections, I right clicked on my Local Area Connection and got properties. Then properties of TCP/IP -> Advanced -> IP Settings. In the default gateways area, I added 192.168.1.2.

Now it all works, yay! If anyone else happens to stumble across this and it helps, please let me know by commenting.

2 comments:

Katie said...

Your awesomeness prevailed :)

Gilbert Josh said...

Thank you so much for sharing all this wonderful info with the how-to's!!!! It is so appreciated!!! You always have good humor in your posts/blogs. So much fun and easy to read!

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