I recently went to visit my grandparents who live on the Mississippi River in La Crescent, MN. For the longest time their neighborhood has been comprised of cottages and cabins. 20 years ago their river-front property wasn’t more than a weekend get-away for most. But over the course of the last 8 or so years builders have moved in, bulldozed most of the cottages, and built monsterous houses that span entire property lots.

I don’t typically bring my laptop with me when I go to visit. My grandparents use dial-up for internet. This time I decided to, just to have something to occupy my time. Before I left I had installed an application called NetStumbler that does a pretty good job locating and listing wireless access points. I fired it up at the grandparents and was surprised to find someone in the neighborhood had a Linksys router. Gitty with excitement I got to work.

The signal was weak and seemed to come and go. I spent the better part of a night trying to figure out where the signal was coming from. After a little “war-walking” (That’s what Courtney calls it) I found that it was coming from a house to the south. The signal was still too faint for my to get solid communication to the DHCP server on the router. I attempted to set my IP address manually guessing the network default was either a 10.0.x or 192.168.0.x based network. I had no luck and gave up for the night.

The next morning the fog was hanging a little lower than before and the clouds were moving in. Perfect for bouncing a wifi signal my way! I fired up my laptop again and started away. After letting my Intel wifi card do its thing for a few extra minutes I was finally able to retrieve an IP address from the DHCP server, on the 192.168.1.x network. I was sooo close! Damn! The signal was still very weak and I had a hard time doing much of anything. I pulled up a web page and showed off my trimuph to the family. They were less than impressed but it solitified my nerd status.

So I did it. I accomplished getting on to the internet through a wireless connection no faster than my grantparents dial-up connection that already existed. But it was fun nonetheless.