Had a good admin day at work today sorting out some of the niggles about the network including finishing the seting up of a Windows-friendly VPN, getting a company-wide LDAP database sorted and getting our Unix and Samba servers to authenticate off it. Another nice thing was getting the intranet wiki to authenticate over it as well.
On the down side I discovered exactly how user unfriendly Windows is. I tried to update my wireless card drivers and now it refuses to recognise the card’s existance. I suspect this is not necessarily the fault of Microsoft but the fault of Belkin whose wireless drivers appear to be of very poor quality. Not only are there no sensible logs it is actually quite some work to find where the PCI vendor and device ids can be obtained. Once there it is trivial to match them with the .INF file and see if the driver actually claims support of my card. Needless to say there are 4 drivers available from the Belkin site (onve you fix the broken links) for the same model of card but all of which have different vendor and product ids. I’m having great fun downloading them all and trying them one by one.
Did I mention each driver bundle is 40Mb in size because it comes with Belkin’s skinned-to-buggery WiFi manager. Despite my best efforts I’ve failed to persuade Belkin I’d like to use XP’s default GUI for managing my network.
*grump*
Update: Fixed it. I gave in and stopped pretending I was a Windows monkey and put my Linux hat on. I headed over the PCI vendor/device ID database to see who actually made the card. Much to my suprise it is the same Broadcom chip as the Airport Extreme. Armed with some decent knowledge I downloaded the Broadcom reference drivers. After a brief moment of discovering how to tell Windows ‘Yes, I really do know what I’m doing, just fucking use this driver for this device!’ my wireless network connection sprang back into life. As a nice side-effect I can use the default Windows GUI to modify settings too; no more buggering with the Belkin setup utility.