…you can memorize your 128-bit WEP keys.
This house I just bought didn’t come pre-wired for much more than electricity. Even one of the phone jacks is the ancient round-faced sort that originally had the big four-pin plug and had been retrofitted to modular. I really don’t know why that kind of jack is here since the house was built in 1989, and they stopped using those four-prong things long before then.
Worse, there was no LAN cabling. You heard right. The luddite who sold the house didn’t even have DSL.
I fixed that.
We now have three new phone jacks, wired LAN and wi-fi, as well as satellite TV. The house is now neatly laced together with bright blue Cat5 cable, all converging on an out-of-the-way corner of the garage, now festooned with routers, switches, patch panels and a lot of wire. Amazingly, it all worked when I turned it on for the first time. Even more amazing, is spouse approval on the installation. Clean in-wall jacks with nary a wire in sight inside the house, and in the garage, the lash-up evoked a “Wow, that’s intricate!” reaction instead of the usual “Geez, those wires are a mess!” 
Well, almost everything worked right off. The switch had a meltdown of sorts (perhaps from being unplugged for two weeks?) and reset itself to factory defaults. This didn’t affect the wired connections, but the wireless went from WEP with a closed SSID to a wide-open “linksys” SSID free for anyone to wander past and poach my bandwidth. I didn’t notice it for two days until I saw “Connected to linksys” scroll by as the PowerBook booted. :smack:
So, log into the switch and reset the device name, DNS servers, workgroup and WEP settings. From memory. Generate new key strings, reboot the Mac and just like normal, “Connected to thepropernetworkname” scrolls by.
It’s good to be a geek.
